"I suppose you've come to tell me what you mean to do."
"I've done it," she said. "I went to Hurd. I went to Ora Bettis. I told the jailer just now, and I'm going to the judge's clerk this afternoon to swear it. They'll open the grave in April, when the ground thaws, and Mr. Marten will take his brother home to Kansas under his own name, and the stone in Corbel will come down." She held his eyes. "And you'll walk out of here, I expect. Mr. Marten says there's not much law for what you did. There'll be talk of the stove. There may be something about the faro bank's paper, if they decide a man can't die to get out of his debts. I don't know. That's for you."
He was very still.
"I asked you," he said. "I asked you to let me stay dead."
"I know you did."
"I thought it was the one thing —" He stopped. His voice had cracked, and he waited for it to mend. "I thought it was the one thing I could still do for you."
"It was the one thing you could still do for yourself," Sabra said. She said it without heat. "You wanted to go to Cañon City and break rock under that boy's name and call it even. You wanted to pay. I understand that. But it wasn't yours to pay with. It was his name, and his mother's, and it was my grave you'd have had me tend. You'd have had me put flowers on a lie every Sunday for the rest of my life and be grateful for the freedom." She paused. "I did that for two years already, Eben. I knew it wasn't you in that box. I knew in the icehouse. I held his hand and saw it wasn't yours and I wrapped it up again and said nothing, because I was glad to be rid of you. I've had to look at that this month. You'll have to look at what you did. That's all. I'm not punishing you. I'm only not letting either of us off."
He stared at her. For a long moment she thought he might be angry, the old anger, the one that had used to come up in him like weather and fill the cabin; she saw it begin in his face and gather. And then she saw it fail. It went out of him the way the air goes out of a bellows, and what was left looked at her with an expression she had never seen on him in nine years of marriage, and it took her a moment to name that one too. It was respect. It was the look of a man who has been beaten fair.
"You knew," he said.