Reed looked at Margaret then—a long look, the kind that had history in it. She had seen him look away from her on the street for eight months. He wasn't looking away now.
"Mrs. Lawson," he said, "I owe you an apology that I don't know how to make adequately. I've been aware of Mercer's methods for longer than I should have let it go on, and I convinced myself that what wasn't my legal jurisdiction wasn't my responsibility." He paused. "That was wrong."
She looked at him for a moment. "Are you going to help, or just apologize?"
The corner of his mouth moved. "I'm going to help."
"Then that's apology enough," she said.
The second major shock arrived on a Wednesday, six days before the hearing, in a form no one had anticipated: Thomas arrived.
He came on the afternoon train from Denver, unannounced, carrying one bag and wearing his school coat, which was too light for Wyoming in October, but which he hadn't had time to replace. Margaret came out of the house when she heard the wagon and stopped dead on the porch steps when she saw who was in it.
He was taller than she remembered. She always forgot this between visits—that her son was twenty years old, and six feet tall, and had Henry's jaw and her eyes, and a way of moving through the world that was entirely his own. He jumped down from the wagon before it fully stopped, and she came down the steps and they met in the middle, and she held onto him harder than she meant to, harder than she had allowed herself to hold onto anything in eight months.
"I told you to stay at school," she said into his shoulder.
"I know," he said. "I came anyway."
She pulled back and looked at his face. He looked back at her with those eyes that were her eyes. And in them, she saw something that wasn't a boy's worry or a boy's impulsive decision to abandon his scholarship and come home. She saw a deliberate choice, made and held.