“I do not.”

His chin quivered with the excitement boiling inside of him. He licked his lips and rubbed his hands together, darted his eyes around her shack before falling once again on Lady Mae. “You sure now?”

“I am,” she said.

His laugh, the one she remembered on the darkest of nights, started low and soft, and she could not be certain that she wasn’t imagining it. But as the wind kicked up behind him, it carried to her the marrow-deep sound of her mother’s death.

“I’m here to tell you your boy’s standing trial tomorrow morning.”

“Trial? What’s he done?”

“Them questions, Lady Mae. Again with them questions.”

“I got a right to know.”

“Want to hear something?” he asked after a moment. “You’re right. In fact, you ought to know what that scoundrel has up his sleeve.”

“He ain’t done nothing.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘nothing,’ now, Lady Mae,” he said, and from within the inner pocket of his coat procured a small piece of yellowed paper. “We found this on him.”

He held it out in front of his face with his right hand, and in the distance, the clock tower rang. The sun had gone behind the peaks, and the glow of dusk blanketed the settlement.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I reckon you know.”

“I don’t know nothing.”

He unfolded the creased and worn piece of paper and his shoulders shook. He leaned from one foot to the other as though he were about to pounce right then and there. Sweat dripped down the curve of Lady Mae’s back, her corset tight, her breath short and labored.

“Dear Lady Mae,” Deputy Iverson began as he read from the paper. “As I sit here the wind howls outside of my window, and I think of you. I try not to, for thinking of you has brought me as much misery as happiness in the years since I’ve been gone. 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. 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. People ain’t gonna fight each other if they ain’t provoked, and who does the most provoking? Them Deputies, that’s who. And you know 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?”