"Because Duncan is selling the waterhole," Rosalind said. "He has been pressing me to sign it over to the railroad company. He tells me Bar Seven needs the money, that the waterhole is a burden, that the railroad will pay handsomely. And because the cattle tallies do not add up, and Sam Kearney has found forty head missing in a quarter, and I have begun to understand that the man who manages my ranch has been managing me as well. I went to the station to look for a lost shipment. I found a trunk instead. I think —" She stopped, and looked at the coat, and at the photograph, and at Miren's book, all three lying on the table together like evidence in a case that had waited eighteen years for a hearing. "I think Elias left it there. I think he meant it to be found by someone who would ask questions. I only wish I had asked them sooner."
Miren closed the flock book, slowly, and laid her hand on its cover. "Eighteen years," she said. "Eighteen years I hated a dead man, and eighteen years you hated him too, and all the while he was the only man in this valley who tried to do the right thing by us. That is a bitter thing to learn at sixty-three. It is a bitter thing to learn at any age."
She looked at Ana then, really looked at her, and Ana saw something in her aunt's face that she had never seen before. It was not pity. It was not guilt, though there was guilt in it too. It was recognition, as if Miren were seeing, for the first time in eighteen years, not the child she had raised but the baby in the photograph, grown up and sitting at her table, wearing the yellow wool, asking questions with a schoolteacher's steady voice.
"Ana," Miren said, and then she stopped, because there are some sentences that cannot be finished in one breath. "There is a letter. Elias wrote a letter with the registration. Tomas Herrera has it. He is the only man in this county who can read Elias's hand properly, because he knew him. Tomorrow he will read it to us, here, at the camp, and then we will know everything. Not half. Everything."
Ana nodded, because she could not speak. She was afraid that if she spoke, she would say the thing that was forming in her mind, the thing she was not ready to say, the thing that would change her name and her history and the whole shape of her life. She looked at the coat, and she looked at the scarf around her own neck, and she looked at the photograph of a man holding a baby at dawn, and she thought: tomorrow. Tomorrow the letter would be read. Tomorrow she would know. Today, she had only this: two women who had hated the same dead man for eighteen years, sitting together in a hut full of wool, with the truth between them on the table, and a flock book that said a child had lived.
Outside, the sun was going down over the Sweetgrass Valley, and the sheep were moving toward the pens, and the dogs were bringing them in, and the light on the grass was the colour of the yellow wool in the basket. Ana stood up, and her legs held her, and she walked out of the hut into the evening air, and she did not look back, because if she looked back, she would see Miren watching her the way Miren had watched her all her life, and tonight that watching would mean something different, and she was not ready for different yet. She stood among the sheep with her basket forgotten in her hand, and the wind came down off the hills, and somewhere behind her, in the hut, the two women sat in silence over a coat and a book and a photograph, and the silence was not the silence of enemies any longer. It was the silence of two people who had just discovered that they had been grieving the same man, in opposite directions, for eighteen years, and that the grief, all this time, had been pointed the wrong way.