She thought, too, of the waterhole itself, and of Duncan's voice in recent weeks, patient and reasonable, urging her to sell Cottonwood Waterhole to the railroad before the drought worsened and the price fell. He had called it good business. He had called it the only sensible course for a ranch the size of Bar Seven. She had resisted him without quite knowing why, telling him the tally came first, telling him she would not sign anything in a dry year. Now she wondered whether her resistance had been instinct, the same instinct that had kept her from telling him about the trunk on the porch that afternoon. A woman who had run a cattle empire for eighteen years learned to trust the small, cold voice that said: not yet. Not to him. Not until you know.
She folded the little yellow jacket with great care, as if it were a letter she was afraid of creasing, and laid it back in the trunk beside the folded registration and the tintype in its leather case. The bundle of letters tied with twine she left untouched, on top of the linen, because she was not ready for them yet. There would be time for letters. Tonight she needed only to sit with what she already knew: that a baby had worn yellow wool, that her husband had held that baby, and that a paper signed by his hand said the waterhole belonged to strangers, forever, and that no one in Juniper Creek had ever told her any of it.
Outside, the wind moved through the cottonwoods, and the cattle lowed in the far pasture, and the house settled around her. She did not sleep that night. She sat at her desk with the yellow wool in her lap and the tintype before her, and she waited for morning, and for the first time since she was twenty-four, she did not know what she was going to do next. But she knew one thing, cold and clear as creek water in October: she would find out, and she would find out alone, before Duncan Pryce ever learned that the trunk existed.
Ana Zubizarreta began her school day the way she always did, by opening the windows of the Juniper Creek schoolhouse and letting the morning in before the children arrived. The schoolhouse was a single room with a stove in the corner, a blackboard that had been wiped so many times it had gone gray at the edges, and twenty-one desks of varying sizes, some of them repaired so often that they seemed to be made more of nails than of wood. Ana liked the room best in this hour, when it was empty and the light came in low across the floorboards and the chalk dust hung in the air like a fine, pale weather. She wrote the day's lesson on the board in her careful hand — reading, numbers, and, because it was the week of the autumn feast, a Basque song her aunt had taught her, the words copied out so the children could sing them even if they did not know what every word meant.
She was twenty-four years old, and she had been the schoolteacher in Juniper Creek for three years, and in that time she had learned that teaching was mostly a matter of patience and of noticing. She noticed which child had not eaten breakfast, which child was afraid of the dark walk home, which child could read a whole page if you let him stand by the window where the light was better. She noticed, too, the things people did not say. She had grown up in a house where a great deal went unsaid — her aunt Miren's house at the edge of town, where the sheep were counted every night and the past was kept folded away like winter blankets, brought out only when the weather demanded it.
On the morning of the feast, Ana took down her yellow shawl from the peg by the door of her aunt's house and wrapped it around her shoulders. The shawl was the finest thing she owned. It was knitted in a soft, clear yellow, the color of late light, and it had belonged to her mother. That was all Miren had ever told her about it: that her mother had made it, with her own hands,