"He'll be all right with it," Nathan said.
"He already is," she said. "He's just processing, like his mother."
"Like his mother," she agreed.
In the days that followed, the valley began the work of reckoning. The territorial prosecutor came from Laramie and spent a week in Red Hollow taking statements. Three of the families who had lost land came forward when it became clear that Mercer could no longer retaliate. Hart stayed an extra two weeks, well past what his original commitment had been, and worked with the prosecutor to build the broader fraud case; and the expression on his face during those two weeks was the expression of a man doing exactly the work he was put on earth to do.
Agnes Carver stayed through all of it, and when it was over, she did not go back to her sister's house in Benton Springs. She stayed in Red Hollow. She started keeping accounts for two of the small ranches that had been too afraid to use anyone connected to Mercer's store, and she did this with the quiet precision of a woman who has spent twenty years being useful and is not going to stop.
Thomas went back to Denver when his two weeks were up. He left on a Thursday morning, and he shook Nathan's hand at the door of the house, and then he hugged his mother for a long time. And when he pulled back, his eyes were bright and not quite dry.
"Come for Christmas," Margaret said.
"I'll come for Christmas," he said. "And I'll write."
"Every two weeks," she said.
"Every two weeks," he said. "Like always."
He rode away down the lane, and she watched him go, and she did not watch too long, because he was going toward something, and that was how she had always measured his departures: not by the leaving, but by the direction.