“Arbuckle—I, I mean—you’d have been a fool to try to come back and fetch me. What then?”

“Don’t know. Guess I would’ve tried to get you out of here. Away from this. From what you got to do.”

“And how’d you plan that?”

“Not sure, I reckon. But I bet we’d make it. Just need to be smart is all.”

The sun finally burst over the horizon, and for a moment Lady Mae could see it: she and Arbuckle up on the mountain, far enough up where no one would go. There they’d live, survive, make love. They would wake together with the sun. A hope sprung in Lady Mae’s chest. What if she said right then and there could we… But Lady Mae was not that naïve. Though the two of them might rise side by side, they would live on constant alert, worried if the freshly fallen snow had simply covered the tracks of Deputies lying in wait.

“You better be careful those words don’t fall out of your mouth in front of anyone else,” Lady Mae said.

“I know, I know. I ain’t going to saying nothing to nobody.”

She had an urge to reach for Arbuckle’s hand when the deep shame rose up inside her. It was always there even when Arbuckle wasn’t, a shadow she just couldn’t get in front of no matter how she tried. And it pulled at her like quicksand, made her feet heavy and her heart sour. Maybe Arbuckle felt it as well. It was what joined them together in a world that had cast them aside. They were the children of miscreants, heirs of misfortune and sadness, and so she found his fingers again and curled her own around them, feeling a rise in her heart when he squeezed her hand three times in a row, their secret code from so many years before.

“Arbuckle.”

“What’s that?”

“So why’d you leave, then?”

Lady Mae asked it softly, gracefully, as if she could with her words shelter Arbuckle from the storm that brewed inside him. She saw it in his shoulders, saw it resting just underneath his eyelids. She had asked the thing she’d wanted to ask for over five years, not because she could no longer hold out but because she saw that he needed to tell her. And so she welcomed it, willing to hear whatever she might so that he could finally rest, his mind no longer spinning a tale that he kept from her.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have left. Maybe if I’d stayed—that man in the square, it wouldn’t have happened. Maybe I could’ve kept you—”

“You couldn’t have done nothing for me, Arbuckle,” she said, and though that was not entirely true, it was mostly true. “Besides, been getting on fine without you five years and counting.”

“That night when I left,” he began. “I had to. My pa was out to get me.”

Arbuckle had never written about why he had set out in the darkness nor had Lady Mae asked. She had wanted to many times, but many times felt the prickling of dread just underneath the surface. What if what he said proved irreparable and cruel? What if he’d said he couldn’t stand to see her take her inheritance, to know that she walked to and from the depot each day with her kit under her arm? But now he’d said his father; it hadn’t been her after all and for that she was grateful.