Ana sat, and for a long moment no one spoke, and then Ana asked the question Rosalind had been dreading and hoping for in equal measure. "What were they like?" she said to Miren. "My mother and father. Not the fire. Them. Before."
Miren was quiet for a time, and when she spoke, her voice had changed, as if a door had opened in it that had been shut for eighteen years. "Your mother knitted that coat in the last month before you were born," she said. "She sang while she knitted, old songs from the mountains, and she said the yellow would keep you warm even when the winter was unkind, because yellow was the colour of the sun coming back. Your father used to tease her that no child of his would ever be cold, not with a mother who could knit sunshine. He was a quiet man, your father, and he laughed rarely, but when he laughed at her, the whole camp laughed with him."
Ana closed her eyes, and a tear went down her cheek, and she did not wipe it away, and Rosalind, watching her, felt the last of her iron go. This was what Elias had died for, she thought. Not a waterhole. Not a paper. A child who would one day sit at a table and ask what her mother sang while she knitted, and a family who would be able to answer. And Duncan Pryce had tried to burn all of that to ash, and then had spent eighteen years selling the ash back to her as land.
Ana sat. She put the tintype down on the table, face up, beside the coat, and she folded her hands in her lap, and she looked at Rosalind, and Rosalind looked at her, and Miren poured water into cups, and Tomas turned the letter over, and outside the hut, the sheep moved in the morning light, and the dogs worked the edges of the flock, and the valley opened like a hand, and the day, which had begun with a letter, went on, as days do, even when everything in them has changed.
Rosalind Carmichael had been awake since before the light. She had dressed in the dark, by habit, the way she had dressed for eighteen years. The house was quiet in the way a house is quiet when the people in it are waiting for something they cannot name. Downstairs, the cook had left coffee on the stove and gone out to the chickens. Upstairs, in the study where the unclaimed trunk still stood against the wall, the little yellow coat lay folded on top of the papers, as if it were listening.
She had rehearsed the conversation a dozen times in the night, and every version of it had gone the same way. She would be generous. She would be precise. She would offer the girl money — a real sum, not a gesture — and a house in Juniper Creek, and schooling paid for as far as any school in the territory could take her, and a place, if she wanted it, in the Bar Seven itself. She had even rehearsed the word she was most afraid of saying aloud, because she knew what it would cost her to say it and what it would cost her not to: daughter. Not a servant's daughter, not a charity case. A daughter, named in her will, with a share of the ranch. It was, she told herself at four in the morning, the only offer large enough to match what had been taken.
She did not know, until Ana Zubizarreta rode up the drive at midmorning, that she had rehearsed the wrong conversation entirely.
Ana had not sent word. She had not asked for an appointment, the way people asked for appointments with Rosalind Carmichael. She came on a borrowed mare, in a plain dark dress with dust on the hem, and she tied the horse herself at the rail and walked up the steps as if she had every right to be there. Sam Kearney, coming out of the barn with a coil of rope over his shoulder, stopped when he saw her, and for a moment Rosalind, watching from the window of the study, thought he would send her away. He did not. He took the mare's reins and nodded her toward the door, and Rosalind understood, with a small jolt, that Sam already knew why she had come.