Thomas said from the corner where he'd been listening, "He panicked."
"Yes," Hart said. "He saw Agnes Carver. He knew about the criminal referral. He panicked, and he overreached, and he filed something that doesn't exist in order to muddy the record." He looked up. "By the time we walk into that courtroom in two days, Caleb Mercer will be defending himself against fraud on three separate fronts: the manufactured debt, the altered ledger entries corroborated by an eyewitness, and now the fabricated reversion clause." He capped his pen. "We are going to win this case."
Nathan was standing in the doorway. He had come in quietly sometime in the last few minutes and stood with his arms folded, and his face held an expression she had not seen in it before—not the steady attentiveness she'd become accustomed to, but something warmer, something that was specifically about this moment and this room and the people in it.
Margaret picked up the original deed: her father's handwriting. Elias Cartwright, who had broken this land open with his bare hands in 1860 and had built something on it, and left it to her—to her specifically, not to a son or a husband, but to his daughter Margaret, because he had known, had always known, what she was capable of.
She thought about him. She thought about Henry. She thought about Thomas in the corner, twenty years old and watching everything with those sharp, careful eyes. She set the deed down.
"Two days," she said. "Let's get ready."
The morning of the hearing, Margaret was up before 4:00. She didn't try to sleep past that. She lay in the dark for a few minutes after waking, listening to the house around her: the particular creak of the walls in the early cold, the distant movement of the horses in the paddock, the absolute stillness of a Wyoming morning before the world remembers to start. She had slept—actually slept, which surprised her. Three hours at least. She took it as a good sign and got up.
She built the fire in the stove and put the coffee on, and sat at the kitchen table with the original deed in front of her, not reading it, just looking at it. Her father's handwriting. Elias Cartwright had not been a man of many words, but he had been a man who meant every one he chose, and the deed was exactly that: plain, unambiguous, without flourish. To my daughter Margaret and her heirs. No conditions, no reversions, no male line requirement. Just a father who had looked at his daughter and seen someone capable of holding a thing, and had trusted her with it.
She heard Nathan's boots on the back step before he knocked. She already had a second cup on the table by the time he came through the door, and he saw it and sat down without comment—which was one of the things about Nathan Cole that she had come to rely on without noticing when that had happened: the way he didn't perform gratitude and returned the current.
"You sleep?" he asked.
"Some. Enough."