“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll be back by sundown.” He stood and walked toward the door.

“Don’t you say nothing to them Deputies,” she warned and followed him. “I told you, they’re worse than they used to be.”

“I reckon I’ve a right to know what happened to my pa once and for all. I’ll find Daniels, ask to see the file. That’s it.”

“I still don’t think—”

“Lady Mae,” he said and turned to face her. “I’ve got to do this. Don’t you see?”

And she did. The same was in her own heart. The urge she’d had—to kill, to maim, the hot hatred in the back of her throat. Arbuckle felt it, too; just because his father was vile didn’t make him not his father. It only took two fingers to strike a match that night, and Arbuckle must’ve heard it catch all the way up in the hills.

“Promise you’ll just ask.”

“Promise. I’ll be okay,” he assured her. “You just be ready to go come sundown.”

“We really doing this?”

“Seems we are,” he said. He tipped the front of his hat back and reached his arms around Lady Mae as his face came within an inch of hers. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it—you and me away from this place—for all them years I was gone.”

Lady Mae encircled his waist with her small arms and pulled him close. His lips touched her forehead, and she felt the soft hair of his beard on her unopened eyes. In his arms, it was safe, and she felt maybe for the first time in her life a sense of ease deep and pure. Then Arbuckle stepped back.

“Arbuckle—be careful. You don’t know what they can do.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon,” he said and closed the door behind him.

* * *

As the day drew on, she could not help but feel a festering grief build inside of her. She tried to tell herself that it was because she was leaving her shack, the only home she had ever known. She’d need to carry her mother’s memory with her now. After all, her mother was not the threads of the quilt or the splinters of the floor. She was not the skirts and corsets Lady Mae wore, nor the tools she sharpened each night. Her mother was in her, buried underneath her own skin.

Am I doing right, Mama?

Only time will tell, my girl.

She spent the morning tidying up the shack; she dusted the beams and swept out the stove, folded the blankets and made the bed. As she did, she took in the memories—the small collection of painted plates, the letters from Arbuckle. She’d leave it all; that power—the same one from all those years ago in the dust, from the other day on the steps of the depot—rose in her and she breathed it in as if it were the last drop of air in the world. Everything she was, she had always been. Her mother had been right.