"Thomas—"
"Professor Alderman gave me leave. He said two weeks. He said—and these are his actual words, Mama—that if a man is studying land law and his mother is fighting a land fraud case in territorial court, that is more education than any classroom, and he should go." He looked at her steadily. "I'm not here to be protected. I'm here to help."
She stepped back from him. She wanted to send him back. Every instinct she had built in eight months of managing this alone said: Keep Thomas out of it. Keep him clean and separate and safe. But he was twenty years old. He was studying land law. And he had his father's stubbornness and her own in equal measure, which meant she was not going to win an argument about whether he stayed.
"Come inside," she said. "I'll introduce you to Daniel Hart."
Nathan was the one Thomas looked at the longest during the introductions. He shook Nathan's hand and held it a beat longer than necessary, looking at him with a direct, assessing gaze that reminded Margaret, with a sudden sharp ache, of Henry—because Henry, too, had looked at people that way, deciding about them by looking rather than asking.
"You're the one who stopped it," Thomas said. "In the street."
"Your mother had already stopped it," Nathan said. "I just altered the method."
Thomas looked at him for another moment. Then he nodded once, slowly, and let go of his hand. It was not approval exactly; it was acknowledgement. The acknowledgement of a young man who had been worrying about his mother from three hundred miles away and had arrived to find her steadier than he'd expected, surrounded by competent people, and was adjusting his understanding of the situation accordingly.
That evening, with all four of them around the kitchen table, Thomas read through the full case documentation. He read it the way Hart did: fast, precise, stopping on specific passages and going back. He asked two questions during the reading. Both of them identified the same two pressure points Hart had identified the previous week, which caused Hart to look at him over the top of his papers with an expression Margaret recognized as the one Hart wore when something impressed him against his will.
"You've been studying contract interpretation?" Hart asked.
"Second year," Thomas said. "Professor Alderman specializes in property disputes. He says the most common mistake in fraud cases is trying to prove intent when you only need to prove effect."