He looked up at her again, past the residents who sat with their backs to her. They tried to restrain themselves from turning around, though some feigned a coughing fit so that they could twist their body just enough to catch a glimpse of her. What did they wish to see? What was it that they so badly wanted from her? Tears balanced on the trembling, burning lids of her eyes. She did not dare raise her hand to wick them away but instead let them drop weightlessly, falling down her cheeks. Arbuckle saw, and his voice softened. He did not take his eyes from her.

“Many nights I’ve sat above the settlement thinking about sneaking back in and getting you, waking you in the middle of the night and running up into them hills. Thought long on it, but each time I did I couldn’t help but think of your mama on the floor. What if you ended up the same way? Wouldn’t be able to survive that.”

He spoke the words without looking down at the letter. They spoke of an improbable future, one of which she had dreamed as well. She had no idea when he had written the letter, but—he had tried to tell her, hadn’t he? The morning before, as they lay spent from a night of finding in each other what they’d been missing all along; maybe if he’d read it then and there this wouldn’t be happening. She would’ve warned him, cautioned him against his words that were true after all.

“So I didn’t come, and though I might’ve sent you letters and books, I ain’t never said the thing I wanted to say. Which is that you got it, too, what your mama had. The knowing of the difference between right and just, that them Deputies got everyone fooled. She gave it to you, birthed it as she did your own self.”

The words, which he knew by heart, came at her, and though she had heard them before, that moment in the courtroom she heard them as if for the first time. He had wanted her—her—in the hills and up the mountain. He’d left, and she’d understood why. He’d wanted to save her and the only way he could was to protect her from her own self. But those thoughts in her he spoke of—they were there all along. She had only been too afraid to see it.

“Been seeing that understanding in you all these years—I know that’s what it is. So here I was setting down, but now I see. It’s already in you, ain’t it?”

His voice rose, clear and deep, and Lady Mae held on to it as best she could. But with each syllable, with each breath, he drifted farther from her, cast out alone by her own hand.

I thought and figured and weighed, Mama.

They weren’t never going to leave him be, my girl.

As Arbuckle lowered the piece of paper to his lap, Deputy Daniels spoke. “Are these,” he asked, “your own words and yours alone?”