He picked up a piece of frayed rope from the ground, turned it over in his hands once, dropped it. "I reckon Cheyenne will still be there in a month."
She studied him for a long moment. There was something in the set of his shoulders that she recognized: not the hardness exactly, but the particular quality of a person who has been alone a long time and has made their peace with it. Henry had never had that. Henry had always needed company around him to feel settled. This man looked like he'd built his own foundation somewhere along the way and carried it with him. She didn't trust it. She didn't trust much of anything anymore.
"The livery is at the end of Second Street," she said. "If you're staying, that's where you'll put your horse. I'm going home."
She walked away without looking back. She held herself straight until she rounded the corner onto the side street where she'd tied her own horse that morning, and then she leaned against the wall of the cooper's shop for thirty seconds and breathed and breathed and breathed.
Eight months. Eight months since they'd put Henry in the ground, and she had held herself together with pure stubbornness and an accountant's brain, and the absolute refusal to let Caleb Mercer win. Eight months of dried-up credit at the store, of neighbors crossing the street when they saw her coming, of the subtle, suffocating pressure of a powerful man making sure everyone in a thirty-mile radius understood that helping Margaret Lawson was the same as making an enemy of him.
She straightened up. She untied her horse. She rode home.
The ride back to the Lawson ranch took forty minutes on a good road in dry weather, and it gave her time to think, which was both a blessing and a curse. The back of her dress was stiff where the welts had stopped bleeding. She'd survived worse than this. She'd survived watching her father die of a bad winter and a worse crop when she was seventeen. She'd survived three miscarriages before Tom was born and two more after. She'd survived finding Henry collapsed in the barn in March with nothing left in him to fight whatever sickness had taken hold. And she'd sat with him for four days while he went, and she hadn't fallen apart then, and she was not going to fall apart now.
What she was going to do was figure out how to save her land in thirty days.
The problem was that Caleb Mercer's papers, while fraudulent, were not obviously fraudulent. She had been through Henry's desk three times. She had cross-referenced every entry in his ledger against the dates on Mercer's loan agreement and found two discrepancies—figures that didn't match, a payment recorded in Henry's hand that Mercer claimed never arrived. But those discrepancies were subtle; a judge without reason to look closely would probably let them slide. She needed either a lawyer with a sharper eye than anything available in Red Hollow, or a way to prove that Henry had never agreed to that amount in the first place.
She needed time she didn't have, and money she didn't have, and allies she had been systematically stripped of.
She was still working through the problem in her head when she turned up the lane toward the ranch and found Nathan Cole already there, sitting on the top rail of her fence, hat in his hand, watching her come.
She pulled up. "How did you—"