"Rosalind," he said, and he was one of the few men who called her by her Christian name. "You were gone a long time. The tally sheets are waiting."
"I will look at them tonight," she said, and she did not meet his eyes. "Have Sam bring the wagon round. There is a trunk to carry in."
"A trunk?" Duncan's voice sharpened, just slightly, the way a man's voice sharpens when he hears something he did not expect. "What trunk?"
"An old trunk from the depot," she said, and she kept her voice level, the way she had learned to keep it level when she was lying to a man who bought cattle. "Unclaimed freight. It has my husband's name on it. I will sort it in my study."
She watched his face. Something crossed it — too quick to name, gone before she could be sure she had seen it — and then it was gone, and he was smiling again, the easy, practiced smile of a man who had managed her ranch for eighteen years.
"Of course," he said. "Shall I help you with it?"
"No," she said. "Sam will do."
She did not tell him what was in the trunk. She did not know why she did not tell him, except that some instinct older than her marriage and sharper than her bookkeeping told her to hold the trunk close until she understood what it was. She carried the brand registration into her study herself, and she locked the study door, and she sat at her desk with the tintype propped against the inkwell and the little yellow outfit laid out on the blotter before her, and she looked at the three things until the light outside her window went from gold to gray to the deep blue of evening.
The baby in the photograph had no name that she knew. The family in the registration had a name she had never heard. And her husband, the man she had hated for eighteen years for burning a camp and dying in a stampede, had held a baby in his arms as gently as if the child were made of glass, and had signed away the most valuable water in the valley to a family of shepherds, forever.
She picked up the little yellow jacket and held it against her cheek. The wool was soft. It smelled faintly of cedar and dust and something else, something sweet and distant, like the memory of a summer she had never lived. And for the first time in eighteen years, Rosalind Carmichael, who had built an empire out of iron and discipline and a clean, simple hatred, allowed herself to wonder whether she had spent those eighteen years hating the wrong man, for the wrong reason, while the truth sat quietly in a trunk at a depot, waiting for someone to come and claim it.
She tried to remember the day Duncan had brought her the news of Elias's death, and the memory came back with a clarity that surprised her, as if it had been waiting all these years behind a door she had never opened. He had come to the house at dusk, his shirt torn, his face blackened with smoke, and he had told her that the shepherd camp had caught fire in the night and that Elias, trying to drive his cattle clear of the flames, had been caught in a stampede of his own frightened herd. He had told her that Elias had set the fire himself, to clear the shepherds from the waterhole, and that the fire had turned on him. She had believed him. She had believed him because she was twenty-four and her husband was dead and the ranch was suddenly hers, and a story with a villain in it was easier to carry than a story with only grief in it. She had built her whole life on that story. She had built Bar Seven on it, stone by stone, rule by rule, and she had never once asked Duncan Pryce to tell it to her again.
Now she asked herself, in the quiet of her study, why the man in that story — a man ruthless enough to burn a camp for water — would have signed a paper giving that same water away forever to the very people he was supposed to have burned out. The two men did not fit together in her mind. They could not both be Elias. One of them was a lie, and she had lived eighteen years inside the lie without ever testing its walls.