and the water had been shared, and the cattle had been moved to the high pasture a week early, and the sheep had been watered at dawn and at dusk, and no one had gone thirsty, and no one had gone to court. That, Rosalind thought, standing on the rise above Cottonwood Waterhole on a bright morning in May, was the real test, and it had been passed not with iron, but with arithmetic and patience, which are quieter virtues and, it turns out, stronger ones.
The school was the part she loved most, and she was not ashamed to say so, even to herself. The old schoolhouse by the creek had been whitewashed and repaired, and a new room had been added on the back, with windows that faced the morning sun, and on the first Monday of September, Ana Zubizarreta had opened its doors as head teacher, with twenty-three children on the benches: shepherd children in heavy coats, ranch children in patched shirts, a miner's daughter from the far end of the valley, and two boys from Juniper Creek whose parents had once said, loudly, that their children would never sit in a classroom with sheep-herders' children. They sat there now, and they learned together, and the town, which had watched the whole thing with the wary attention towns give to experiments, had quietly stopped calling it an experiment and started calling it the school.
Ana was a natural head teacher in a way that surprised no one who knew her and surprised Rosalind most of all, because Rosalind had first met her as a quiet girl at a desk, and had only slowly learned the steel underneath the quiet. She taught reading in the morning and arithmetic after lunch, and in the afternoons she taught the shepherd children the songs their grandmothers had sung, and the ranch children the names of the grasses, and everyone, together, the history of the valley — not the version Rosalind had grown up on, and not the version Duncan had told, but the plain version, with the fire in it and the registration in it and the year of silence in it, told the way history should be told: as something that happened to real people, and that real people could learn from.
Miren came to the school twice a week, when her legs allowed it, and she sat in the back with her knitting, and she told stories when Ana asked her to, and the children listened to her the way children listen to someone who has actually lived through the things she is describing. She had grown softer in the year since the fire's truth came out, not in the way of a person who has forgotten, but in the way of a person who has finally been believed. She kept her flock book on the teacher's desk, open to the page for September 1872, and when a child asked about it — as children always did, eventually — she would tell them, simply, that a fire had burned a camp, and that a good man had carried a baby out of it, and that the baby had grown up to be their teacher. The children always looked at Ana then, and Ana always smiled, and the lesson always continued, because that is how a valley heals: not by forgetting, but by telling the story until it becomes a story, and not a wound.
Rosalind visited the school often, and she did not visit as a baroness inspecting her property. She visited as a neighbor, and she brought books, and she brought apples from the ranch orchard, and she sat in the back and listened, and once, when a small boy asked her what she did, she thought for a moment and said, "I used to run a ranch. Now I help run a valley, which is harder, and better." The boy had nodded as if this were a perfectly reasonable answer, and Rosalind had gone home that evening feeling lighter than she had in years.
And then there was Tomas.
Dr. Tomas Herrera had courted Rosalind the way he did everything: quietly, patiently, without fanfare, and with a respect for her independence that had, over the years, become the foundation of everything between them. He had been there in the depot when she opened the trunk. He had been there when she needed someone who could read a dead man's handwriting without flinching, and he had been there on the steps in Juniper Creek, and he