Nathan sat back in his chair. He looked at her with something she couldn't immediately categorize—not sympathy exactly, not admiration exactly, but a kind of careful, serious respect. "How long have you been running all of this by yourself?" he asked.
She didn't have to think about the answer. "Since the morning I found Henry on the barn floor. Months before he died, he couldn't manage the books anymore. I took over then. I kept them alongside him. He was better with people, and I was better with numbers. We understood that about each other."
He nodded slowly. "And your boy? Thomas?"
She felt the quick, involuntary tightening in her chest she always felt when Thomas came up. "He's at school in Denver. Scholarship. He worked three years for it. I am not calling him home." Her voice carried an edge she hadn't meant to put there. "Whatever happens here, he finishes his education. That is not a negotiable point."
"I wasn't suggesting it should be," Nathan said quietly. "I was just thinking about who you're fighting for."
The percolator hissed. Outside, a horse stamped in the paddock. The afternoon light through the window had gone gold.
"You've been on your own with this for eight months," he said. "That's a long time."
"People have managed worse."
"They have. Doesn't mean it wasn't a heavy carry."
She looked at him. He wasn't pitying her. He was just naming it—naming it the way you'd name a fact about the landscape. That mountain is high. That river runs cold. This woman has been carrying something heavy alone for eight months. Just a fact. She had forgotten, somewhere in the long, grinding work of survival, what it felt like to have someone acknowledge the weight without trying to take it from her.
She picked up her coffee cup. "I need a lawyer. I need the telegraph compromise somehow, either bypassed or the operator replaced. And I need at least two more payments documented in ways Mercer can't dispute. Which means going back through twelve years of records and finding every transaction that contradicts his numbers."
"That's three separate problems," Nathan said.