Tomas read on. "I will meet Miren Zubizarreta at dawn tomorrow, at the camp, and I will hand her the papers myself, so that no agent and no foreman and no lawyer can come between the gift and the giver. I have told only one man of this meeting, because I need horses at dawn, and that man is Duncan Pryce, my foreman, who has served me well and whom I trust to keep a confidence."
The words hung in the hut like smoke. Rosalind felt them settle on her skin. Only one man knew. Duncan Pryce. The man who had told her, the morning after the fire, that Elias had set it and died in the stampede. The man who had fenced the waterhole within the month. The man who was now pressing her to sell the waterhole to the railroad, and whose cattle tallies did not add up, and who had managed her ranch for eighteen years on the strength of a story he had told her when she was too broken with grief to question it.
"Go on," she whispered.
"There is one more page," Tomas said, and his voice was gentler now, as if he were afraid of what the page would do to her. "It is shorter. It is not part of the letter, exactly. It is a note, written in the margin, in a different ink. It says: 'If anything happens to me before morning, tell Miren that the child is safe in my keeping until dawn, and that the coat will tell her who the child is. The coat was knitted by her mother. No one else in this valley knits that yellow.'"
Rosalind closed her eyes. The coat. The yellow coat. The coat that had been lying on the table all night, beside the photograph and the flock book, waiting for someone to understand it. The coat knitted by a mother who was dead, for a child who had lived, in a colour that no one else in the valley could make, because the flower it was dyed with grew only on the slopes her people had come from. The coat was not a keepsake. It was a signature. It was a name, written in wool, for a child too young to have a name of her own.
And then, from the doorway of the hut, there came a sound. It was very small. It was the sound of a basket being set down too hard, and a breath being caught, and a foot stepping back on the threshold. Rosalind turned, and Tomas turned, and Miren turned, and in the doorway stood Ana.
She had come back from the flock early. She had come to the hut for bread, or for water, or for some small errand of the morning, and she had stopped at the door, and she had heard. Her face was white, and her hands were empty, and her eyes were fixed on the table, on the coat and the photograph and the letter in Tomas's hands, and on Rosalind, who was looking at her now the way she had looked at her yesterday: as if she were seeing a face she had seen before, in another place, in another year.
"That is me," Ana said. It was not a question. It was the voice of a schoolteacher stating a fact she had just learned from a book, except that the book was her own life, and the fact was that she was the child in the photograph, and the baby Elias Carmichael had carried out of the fire at dawn, and the child Miren had kept for eighteen years without telling her whose child she was to the world beyond the camp.
Rosalind stood up. She did not know what to do with her hands. She had spent eighteen years knowing what to do with her hands: they signed papers, they counted cattle, they held reins, they gave orders. Now they hung at her sides, useless, while a young woman stood in the doorway of a shepherd's hut and looked at her with eyes that were full of shock and grief and something else, something Rosalind recognised, because she had felt it herself yesterday: the terrible, vertiginous feeling of a life being rewritten underneath you while you are still standing in it.