Rosalind Carmichael did not sleep that night. She lay in the small room Miren had given her — a shepherd's room, with a narrow bed and a blanket that smelled of wool and woodsmoke — and she listened to the camp settle around her, to the sheep shifting in the pens, to the dogs sighing in their sleep, to the wind moving over the Sweetgrass Valley like a hand over a page. She had spent eighteen years sleeping in a big house at Bar Seven, in a room with a door she could lock, and she had slept the sleep of a woman who believed she knew exactly who her enemies were. Tonight she slept, or did not sleep, in a hut, with a coat and a photograph and a flock book on the table in the next room, and every certainty she had built her life on had come loose in her hands.
She thought about Elias. Not the Elias of the story Duncan had told her — the hard man, the man who burned a camp and died in a stampede, the man she had spent eighteen years hating because hating him was easier than missing him. She thought about the Elias she had married in 1868, when she was thirty years old and he was twenty-nine, and Bar Seven was nothing but a name and a herd and a waterhole. He had not been a gentle man. She would not lie to herself about that, not now, not when the truth was finally beginning to come out. He had been stubborn and proud and sometimes cruel in the small, careless ways that men of his generation were cruel, the ways that did not look like cruelty until you added them up over a lifetime. But he had also been the man who, on their wedding night, had taken her hands and said that whatever Bar Seven became, it would not be built on another family's ruin, because his father had built the first Carmichael holding on exactly that, and he had watched the shame of it eat at the old man until it killed him.
She had forgotten that promise. Or rather, she had buried it under eighteen years of iron. After Elias died, she had run Bar Seven with a discipline that became famous in the county: no debts unpaid, no cattle uncounted, no weakness shown. She had risen before dawn and ridden the fences herself, and she had learned the tally books until she could spot a missing head from a column of figures the way other women spotted a dropped stitch. She had turned Bar Seven from a struggling holding into an empire, and she had told herself that the empire was a monument to Elias, that every fence and every head of cattle was proof she had not let his work die with him. What she had never asked, in all those years of building, was whether the empire she was building was the one Elias had wanted built at all. And Duncan Pryce had been there for every year of it, at her right hand, praising her discipline, bringing her the tallies, telling her which neighbours to trust and which to fence out, and she had listened to him because he had been there on the morning after the fire, and because a grieving woman takes the hand that is offered, even when she cannot see whose hand it is. She had told herself that iron was what the ranch needed, and that iron was what she needed, and that grief was a luxury she could not afford. What she had not told herself, until tonight, was that iron had also been a way of not asking questions. A woman who is busy counting cattle does not have to ask who set a fire. A woman who is busy fencing a waterhole does not have to ask who the waterhole belonged to before the fence went up. A woman who hates a dead man does not have to miss him, and missing him was the one thing she had never allowed herself to do.
In the morning, the camp woke early, as camps do. Miren was already at the fire, making bread, her face closed and calm, as if yesterday had not happened. Ana was nowhere to be seen — out with the flock, Miren said, or so Rosalind understood from the nod toward the hills — and Rosalind was grateful, in a way she could not have explained, for the girl's absence. She needed to hear the letter first, without the girl's eyes on her. She needed to know the whole of it before she had to look at the child in the photograph and see her grown up and standing in front of her.