She was twenty-four years old. She had been raised by Miren since she was a baby. She had never known her parents' names until this minute. And now, in a hut full of wool, with a coat on the table and a photograph beside it, the arithmetic was doing itself in her head, and she did not want it to finish, because if it finished, everything she had ever believed about her life would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, and she was not sure she had the strength for it today.
"Wait," she said. Her voice came out hoarse. "Wait. You are saying —"
"I am saying what the book says," Miren said, and her eyes were on Ana now, and they were full of a grief so old it had become part of her face. "And what the book does not say is whose child she was to anyone but us. The book says she lived. The book says the cattleman carried her out. The book does not say what became of her after, because I stopped writing about her. I wrote about sheep instead. Sheep are safer to write about than children."
Rosalind reached into the oilcloth and took out a folded paper, creased and yellowed at the edges, and laid it beside the flock book. It was a brand registration, and Ana could see the seal of the county on it and a signature in a bold hand, and words she could only partly read from where she stood: Cottonwood Waterhole, and the name Zubizarreta, and the word "forever," written out in full, as if the man who wrote it had wanted no one to mistake his meaning.
"This is the other half," Rosalind said. "Elias registered the waterhole for the Zubizarreta family, forever, before the fire. Not for Bar Seven. For you. I found it in the trunk with the coat and the photograph. Duncan has been telling me for eighteen years that the waterhole is Bar Seven's by right, and all the while this paper was sitting in a trunk at the station, waiting for someone to open it."
Miren stared at the paper. Her hand, which had been steady through the reading of the flock book, began to shake. "He was coming back with papers," she whispered. "That is what he said. 'Keep her. I will come back with papers.' I thought it was a lie told to a frightened woman at dawn. I thought he meant papers to take the land. I never thought he meant papers to give it back."
Ana sat down. She did not remember deciding to sit. The chair was behind her, and then she was in it, and her hands were in her lap, and her hands were shaking too. She thought of all the Sundays she had walked to this camp, all the mornings she had watched Miren work the flock, all the evenings Miren had knitted by the fire and never once told her the names Ione and Joseba. She thought of the scarf around her neck, which she had worn to school a hundred times, which the children had admired, which she had always thought was simply a scarf. She thought of the baroness of Bar Seven, sitting in Miren's hut, holding a coat the size of a newborn, and saying that her husband had not been a villain but a man trying to give something back, and that he had died trying.
She thought, too, of the winter Miren had knitted the scarf, sitting by this same fire with the yellow wool in her lap, her fingers moving without looking, the way they always did when her mind was somewhere else. Ana had asked her then, idly, why the yellow, and Miren had said only that it was the colour of the high slopes in summer, and that some colours were for remembering and some were for forgetting, and that a woman chose which was which every time she picked up her needles. Ana had laughed at the time, thinking it one of her aunt's riddles. Now the riddle had an answer, and the answer was lying on the table in the shape of a coat too small for any child she had ever taught, and the yellow of it seemed to look back at her, patient and unblinking, like an eye that had waited eighteen years to be recognized.
"Why now?" Ana asked. It was the only question she could hold onto. "Why, after eighteen years, does the trunk open now?"