Lady Mae had long dreamed of their reunion—she’d planned what she’d say, how he might answer, where the words they spoke to each other might take them. The thing, the weighty question that burned at the edges—how could she ask that? What would he say to the why and how and could you that she so desperately needed to know? She’d resolved that morning that she’d ask, that she couldn’t move beyond anything without an answer. And so in a clear voice she asked, “Why’d you leave?”

Arbuckle sucked in a breath, but did not immediately speak. Instead, his mouth twisted as though to not let the words out. She pulled at his hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “You can tell me.”

“Don’t reckon I can say, exactly.”

“What’d he do to you? Before you left?” She asked this gently and brought her other hand to his arm.

“Ain’t nothing he hadn’t done before.”

“They said it sounded like murder.”

“Who’s they?”

“Ruby Swanson, Wilson. Overheard them a few days after you’d gone.”

“What’d they say?” Arbuckle asked. Behind his voice was both a curiosity and a disdain that surely pulled at him; he did not wish to know what was said of him for he had spent his life trying to unhear the torment into which he had been born.

“That the hollering bounded all through the settlement.”

“I suppose it must’ve.”

“When you got to the edge—them Deputies didn’t try to stop you?” asked Lady Mae.

“No, they did not.”

“So they just let you go?”

“Aye. Said I still had my lot and to not go getting any fancy ideas.”

“You could’ve waited—could’ve told me you was going to leave.”

She didn’t mean to say it so sudden and accusatory-like, but she had, and now it was done. She had not said the words why did you and all alone, but she might as well have. His absence all this time—had it mattered to him as well? Did he feel the suffocating void of her as she did him? He would not think her foolish, though.

“Been lonely around here,” she admitted. Doing so surprised her, and it was as if she wasn’t even herself. But still she could not help but let the truth fall from her lips.

“Up there, too.”

“We’re here now, though.”

“So we are.”

Arbuckle lifted her hand and brought it to his chest. She heard birds call from above, their song floating down around them, and felt his heart through his thin shirt. The wind shifted and kicked up the dust around them. Arbuckle took his handkerchief out of his pocket and held it to his mouth and nose.

“You know I been meaning to say,” he said through the fabric. She looked up at his face, at the lines that had appeared near his eyes. She opened her mouth to say you came back and didn’t never think and all them prayers. But the wind carried with it a clamor of voices that came from the direction of the scaffold. They dropped their hands and peered toward the end of the road.