"You might have."
"I might." He looked up. His face was very still. "I'd like to be angry with you, Mrs. Hale. I find I'm having trouble with it."
"You've a right to be."
"I expect I have." He breathed out. "But I keep thinking that if you'd said, there'd have been a hue and cry for Eben Hale, and he'd have been found or not, and either way nobody would have connected him to a boy from Fairplay with a stolen horse. Lem would still have been a stranger in a box. It was only Hale that knew who he was. Only Hale ever could have told it." He shook his head. "You kept a secret that would have done my brother no good. He kept one that would have brought him home. I'd be a fool to put them on the same scale."
"They're on the same scale," Sabra said. "I put them there myself."
He looked at her a long moment.
"Why?" he said. "If you don't mind me asking. Why didn't you want to know where he was?"
She looked at the window, at the blue light, at the snow piling softly on the sill outside the glass.
"Because I was happy," she said. "For the first time in nine years I was happy. And I knew if I found him, I'd have to stop."