I turned my car off the main road onto the drive, taking a route I hadn’t traveled for so many years—but it was a journey my heart had made a million times. My breath caught in my throat when the farm came into view. The gate had been replaced with a newer style, and beyond it in the distance, I saw a new windmill and that Texas live oak tree, sprawling with new life and thickened branches.

After the trial, I had Henry transferred to a facility in Amarillo. The doctors there weren’t nearly ready to recommend release just yet, but I was hopeful that it would happen one day. That new hospital had a gentler approach anyway, treating Henry with psychotherapy and low doses of sedatives only when he couldn’t sleep. My brother wasn’t the same man he once was—the brain damage wasn’t likely to heal, and combat fatigue was going to be a part of his life for a long time. His short-term memory was terrible, and he still got that glazed, confused look on his face sometimes—often when I talked too fast or dumped too much information on him all at once. The delusions and paranoia were gone, but maybe those problems would return one day too.

I’d take him however he came, and we’d navigate all that together.

And like Calvin once told me, every man needed a reason to get out of bed in the morning. That was why, after the trial finished, I picked up my pen and wrote Betsy Nagle a letter. Henry had been writing her too, so she already knew about his struggles and the trial. I just wanted to see if she knew what had happened to my parents’ old farm.

Way back in 1935, Judge Nagle sold that patch of land for a song to a man who let the place go to ruin for a while. But the desperate times eventually passed, and the judge’s conscience would not let up. In the forties, his finances stabilized again, and he bought the farm back and put some suitcase farmers on it.

Ever since then, a roster of strangers had done a stint on my land, making money for the Nagle family by growing them crops. But the Nagles just so happened to be looking for new tenants, Betsy told me, and her father said I should come right on up to sign a lease.

I had torn Calvin Miller’s heart to shreds, but just as I’d always known, he was a good man—the best man. He wasn’t obligated to give me a single cent of his money when I walked out on our marriage, but he generously gave me enough money to support myself for a few years while I “found my feet.”