Chapter 2 - The Apology She Never Sent
Silas Boone waited until supper before asking whether Graham intended to pretend nothing had happened.
Graham sat at the long table in the ranch house with a plate of beef and potatoes cooling untouched in front of him.
Leah had been given the spare room upstairs.
Graham had expected the journey to make her hungry.
Instead she had eaten half a biscuit, thanked the cook and disappeared with the exhausted look of somebody whose body had finally realized the road was over.
Silas sat opposite Graham.
Around them, ranch hands talked about fences, rainfall and a brindle calf that had discovered how to escape every pen built for it.
Nobody mentioned Colorado.
Nobody had to.
Graham eventually put down his fork.
“What?”
Silas raised one eyebrow.
“You’ve been staring at that wall long enough I figure either the wall owes you money or you’re thinking.”
“I can do both.”
“The wall’s innocent.”
“Can’t say the same for everybody.”
Silas leaned back.
There had been a time when Graham could provoke him easily.
Six years had changed that.
Or maybe guilt had.
Graham was no longer sure whose.
“You want to ask me something,” Silas said.
“Did you know?”
“About Matilda dying?”
“No. About her discovering you were innocent.”
Silas’s gaze dropped.
That was answer enough.
Graham’s chair scraped against the floor.
“How long?”
Silas did not move.
“Sit down.”
“I asked you a question.”
“And I heard it.”
“How long?”
“About a year.”
Graham laughed once.
Not because anything was funny.
Men at the far end of the table gradually stopped talking.
Graham looked at them.
“Finish eating.”
Conversation returned, quieter.
He faced Silas.
“A year.”
“Yes.”
“She wrote you.”
“She did.”
“But not me.”
“No.”
“And you said nothing.”
Silas rested both hands around his coffee cup.
“She told me she had found proof enough to know she’d been wrong. Not enough to prove who stole the money.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Silas’s face tightened.
“Every day.”
Graham pushed his plate away.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you weren’t angry about whether I stole anything anymore.”
Graham stared.
Silas continued.
“You were angry she chose not to believe you.”
“And that made silence better?”
“No. It made it yours.”
Graham almost stood again.
Then he caught himself.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I spent six years watching you build something from the ground up. First winter here we had fourteen cattle, one roof that didn’t leak, another that did and enough beans to make a man hate beans until Judgment Day.”
Despite himself, Graham remembered.
Silas went on.
“You worked because you were angry. Then you worked because men depended on you. Somewhere along the way, you stopped looking east every morning.”
“So you decided to keep me ignorant.”
“I decided I wasn’t dragging you back unless you wanted to go.”
“She was my mother.”
“I know.”
“You had no right.”
Silas accepted that without argument.
“You’re right.”
That response took some of the fight from Graham.
He hated that too.
“Where’s the letter?”
Silas stood.
“Come on.”
They crossed the yard to the bunkhouse.
Silas kept a small room at the end, though Graham had offered him a cabin more than once.
Inside sat a narrow bed, wooden chair, washstand and a cedar box beneath the window.
Silas opened it.
He removed a folded envelope.
Graham recognized Matilda’s handwriting immediately.
The letter was addressed to Silas Boone.
Silas handed it over.
Graham did not take it.
“That’s yours.”
“She’s dead.”
“It’s still yours.”
“You need to read it.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s something in there I never told you.”
Graham finally accepted the paper.
The letter had been opened many times.
He unfolded it.
Silas,
There is no way to write this without admitting I did a terrible thing.
Graham stopped.
Those words had not appeared in his letter.
He continued.
You told the truth six years ago.
So did Graham.
I was grieving, frightened and too proud to admit I trusted the wrong man because admitting it would mean understanding what I had done to the two people who tried hardest to protect Thomas after he died.
I found a freight copy in Thomas’s old papers.
It proves the cattle payment was redirected before reaching our account.
I do not yet know who authorized it.
But I know you did not.
Graham’s throat tightened.
He read faster.
I am sorry, Silas.
Those words are smaller than the harm I caused.
I have no right to ask forgiveness.
I am only asking one thing.
If Graham is well, tell me that much.
Do not tell him I asked.
Matilda
Graham lowered the paper.
“She asked whether I was well.”
“Yes.”
“What did you answer?”
Silas nodded toward the cedar box.
“There.”
A copy lay beneath several receipts.
Graham took it.
Matilda,
He is well.
He owns his land.
People trust him.
He still drinks coffee too strong and thinks three hours of sleep counts as enough.
I accept your apology.
What belongs between you and Graham belongs between you and Graham.
Silas
That was all.
Graham stared at it.
“You forgave her?”
“Yes.”
“Just like that?”
“No.”
Silas met his eyes.
“Took me three weeks to write those four words.”
Graham looked away.
Silas sat on the bed.
“Your mother made a terrible mistake.”
“She called you a thief in front of half the town.”
“I remember.”
“She let Pike tell everybody you stole Father’s cattle money.”
“I remember that too.”
“She told me if I rode away with you, not to come back.”
Silas was silent.
Graham’s voice dropped.
“She picked him over me.”
“No.”
Graham turned.
“Don’t.”
“She picked fear.”
“Feels the same when you’re standing in the yard with your saddle packed.”
Silas nodded.
“Yes.”
That stopped Graham.
The older man rubbed a thumb over a scar on his palm.
“I loved your father like a brother,” Silas said. “When that money disappeared, your mother was three months from losing everything. Thomas had just been buried. Half the county owed Pike something. He walked into that house carrying papers that made me look guilty.”
“And she believed him.”
“She believed proof.”
“False proof.”
“We know that now.”
“I knew it then.”
Silas looked at him.
“You believed me because you loved me.”
“Yes.”
“Your mother distrusted me because she was terrified.”
Graham’s expression hardened.
“You defending her now?”
“No. I’m explaining a thing I spent years trying to understand.”
“I don’t need explanations.”
“That’s what her letter said too.”
Graham looked down at Matilda’s words.
Explanations are often just excuses dressed for company.
For the first time, he wondered how many nights she had sat at that same scarred kitchen table searching for sentences that did not sound like excuses.
He folded the letter.
“You coming?”
Silas smiled faintly.
“Knew you were going before you did.”
“I haven’t said I am.”
“Son, you’ve been packing in your head since that woman showed you the mortgage.”
Graham left without answering.
Leah was standing on the porch.
The ranch had settled into evening.
Lanterns glowed around the bunkhouse.
Somewhere a man played three uncertain notes on a harmonica and then apparently decided the world was better without the fourth.
Leah held a cup.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Graham asked.
“I’ve been on trains, stages and horses for nearly two weeks. My body no longer has any opinion about time.”
He leaned against a porch post.
“Why did you live with my mother?”
Leah looked at the dark yard.
“That’s complicated.”
“So is everything else.”
“She found me in Red Bluff.”
“Doing what?”
“Standing outside a boardinghouse in the rain with eight dollars, one suitcase and nowhere I intended to go.”
Graham waited.
“My husband had died seven months earlier.”
He had not expected that.
“I’m sorry.”
“So was I.”
She smiled sadly.
“It was a fever. Fast. We had been married eleven months.”
Graham did not know what to say.
Leah spared him the effort.
“Afterward, I worked bookkeeping jobs. One was for Pike Freight.”
Graham straightened.
“You worked for Gideon Pike?”
“For six weeks.”
“And you didn’t think that was important?”
“I thought you might listen better after you stopped looking at me like I had personally arranged your mother’s death.”
He almost denied it.
Then decided she had earned the truth.
“Fair.”
Leah sipped her coffee.
“I quit when I discovered Pike’s manager changing numbers in freight ledgers.”
“What numbers?”
“Destinations. Buyers. Payment routing.”
Graham looked at her.
“Cattle?”
“Sometimes.”
“And four years ago?”
“I asked questions I should not have asked. I lost the job. Pike made certain nobody else in Red Bluff wanted to hire me.”
“And my mother took you in.”
“She needed help with the books. I needed a roof.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“Because she became family.”
The word struck him strangely.
Leah noticed.
“She never tried to replace you with me.”
“I didn’t say she did.”
“You thought it.”
Graham almost smiled.
Almost.
“You know an awful lot about what I think.”
“I had four years of training with Matilda Alder.”
That did make him smile.
Briefly.
Leah looked toward him.
“She talked about you more in the last year.”
“What did she say?”
“That you hated onions.”
“I do.”
“That you broke your left wrist at thirteen after jumping from the hayloft because Silas dared you.”
“Silas pushed me.”
“He says otherwise.”
“He lies.”
“She said you used to whistle when you were nervous.”
Graham stopped smiling.
Leah immediately understood.
“Oh.”
“You done?”
“Probably.”
“No. Finish.”
She hesitated.
“She said the worst thing she had ever done was confuse being afraid with being right.”
The porch became quiet.
Graham looked out at the ranch he had created because there had been nowhere else he wanted to belong.
“What do you think is in Colorado?”
Leah answered carefully.
“The truth.”
“That’s an expensive word.”
“It usually is.”
“And if Pike’s note is valid?”
“Then the house is gone.”
“If it’s false?”
“We prove it.”
“You make that sound easy.”
“No.”
She looked at him.
“I make it sound necessary.”
The following morning, before sunrise, Graham told the ranch foreman he would be gone several weeks.
By six, three horses were saddled.
Leah came down wearing the same wine-colored dress beneath a traveling coat.
She stopped when she saw Silas beside the horses.
“You’re coming?”
Silas tightened his saddle cinch.
“Somebody has to make sure he doesn’t turn around halfway.”
Graham swung into the saddle.
“I can still fire you.”
“You’ve threatened that for six years.”
“One day I’ll mean it.”
“One day I’ll be impressed.”
Leah hid a smile.
Graham looked east.
The sky beyond the Wyoming plains was turning pale.
Colorado waited several hundred miles away.
So did Matilda’s house.
Gideon Pike.
The fraudulent mortgage.
And one morning Graham had spent six years refusing to remember.
May you like
He nudged his horse forward.
Behind him, tied carefully beneath his bedroll, the silver spurs traveled home with him.
