He wrapped his hands around the cup. He looked at the deed on the table. "How are you?"
She considered the question honestly, the way she had learned to consider questions Nathan asked, because he asked them like he actually wanted the answer and not just the polite version of it. "I'm ready," she said. "I've been ready for eight months. Today is just the day it finally gets to happen."
He nodded. He didn't add anything to that, which was correct, because it didn't need anything added.
Thomas came in twenty minutes later, already dressed, his school coat exchanged for a heavier one that Nathan had lent him without making a production of it. He poured coffee and sat down, and the three of them were quiet together in the early morning, which was its own kind of statement about what had been built in this kitchen over the past two weeks.
Hart appeared at 6:00, sharp-eyed and alert in the way Margaret suspected he always was at 6:00 in the morning, regardless of the circumstances. Agnes Carver was with him, small and composed, wearing her good dress. She had not wavered since her decision in her sister's parlor; if anything, she had gotten calmer as the hearing approached, the way some people do when they've made a hard choice and committed to it fully, and there's nothing left to do but follow it through.
They rode into Red Hollow in a group, the five of them together: Hart with his bulging satchel across his saddle, Agnes in the wagon, Margaret and Nathan and Thomas on horseback. The morning was cold and clear, and the road was hard and dry under the hooves, and Margaret kept her back straight and her chin level, and thought about her father.
The courthouse in Red Hollow was the largest building in town after the grain elevator—a two-story frame structure with a pressed tin ceiling and a territorial flag that snapped in the October wind above the door. There were more people on the street than a Tuesday morning usually warranted. Word had traveled, of course it had, in a town this size, in a valley this connected by debt and commerce and the invisible threads of shared anxiety. Word that the Mercer case was finally going to court had traveled fast and far.
She recognized most of the faces on the boardwalk—faces that had looked away from her for eight months. Some of them still looked uncertain: people trained by too long under Mercer's influence to trust that this would go the way it should. But some of them were different: Clara Briggs was there with her account books under her arm; Ed Loomis from the mill; Pete McAllister, who had come in early enough to get a seat; Reverend Hollis, who had marked the previous week that he intended to sit in the courtroom as a witness to what happened, because he owed her that much, and probably more.
She looked at none of them for long. She looked forward. They went up the steps and inside.
Caleb Mercer was already there. He was seated at the plaintiff's table with his attorney, a lean, silver-haired man from Cheyenne named Aldridge, who wore a coat that cost more than Margaret's cattle had made last season. Mercer himself was composed in the particular way of powerful men who have convinced themselves that composure equals strength: back straight, hands folded, expression calibrated to suggest that this proceeding was a minor inconvenience he was tolerating with patience.
He looked at Margaret when she walked in. She looked back at him. She didn't look away. She held his gaze for exactly long enough to communicate clearly and without anger that she was not the woman he had tied to a hitching post six weeks ago. Then she turned to her own table and sat down, and opened her notes. She felt rather than saw him register this; she felt the slight shift in the room that accompanied it.