Thomas sat beside her. Nathan sat in the gallery directly behind her, close enough that she could have reached back and touched his arm. She was aware of this with the particular precision she'd developed over two weeks for knowing exactly where Nathan Cole was in relation to her.
Hart set his papers out in a row and leaned toward her. "The judge has received the expanded brief, including the criminal fraud referral. He's agreed to hear it all in one proceeding: civil and criminal, simultaneously. This is unusual, and Aldridge objected, but Alderton overruled him this morning before we arrived."
She absorbed that. "Which means..."
"Which means if we win the civil question, we don't have to come back for a separate criminal proceeding. It all resolves today."
Today. Eight months of work, and eight months of fear, and eight months of early mornings and lamplit nights and ledgers and cut fence wire and manufactured debt—all of it resolving today, in this room with its pressed tin ceiling and its territorial flag snapping outside.
"All right," she said. "Let's finish it."
Judge Alderton entered at precisely 9:00, and the room stood and sat and then was quiet, in the way rooms get quiet when the person who holds the official authority has arrived and the thing has officially begun. He was sixty-some, broad-shouldered, with a white beard cut close and eyes that were neither warm nor cold, but simply accurate—the eyes of a man who had spent thirty years looking at arguments and cutting to their bones. He looked at Mercer's table and then at Margaret's, and his gaze moved over each of them without landing on anything that wasn't relevant.
"This proceeding," he said, "will address the civil claim of debt obligation filed by Caleb Mercer against the estate of Henry Lawson, the counter-filing of fraud submitted by counsel for the defense, and the criminal referral for systematic financial fraud currently under territorial review. We will hear all of it today." He looked at Aldridge. "Counsel for the plaintiff may proceed."
Aldridge was good; Margaret had known he would be. He stood and presented Mercer's case with the practiced ease of a man who has argued in front of more judges than she had cooked dinners. And his argument was clean and simple: Henry Lawson had a debt; the debt passed to his estate; the estate was the ranch; the ranch should satisfy the debt. He did not mention the reversion clause filing. He had already seen that that particular maneuver had been stripped away by the actual deed, and Aldridge was too experienced to stand in front of a judge and defend something that had already collapsed.
Mercer sat at his table looking composed. His hands were still folded.
Then Hart stood up. He did not begin with the ledgers; he began with people.