I laid my head on my knees, turned my face to watch him. “Their deaths were not your fault.”
A vein beat on his neck. “I should’ve protected her, protected my child.”
I scooted across the dirt until my thigh pressed along his. He said, “I failed.”
“There is no version in which you failed.”
I adjusted until I settled between his legs. He tensed, but then eased so I could lean against his chest. He looped an arm around my shoulder, allowing comfort from me. He scrutinized the night sky, the wind through the forest canopy, all that he couldn’t control.
This sorrow was where his grief began, when his life had been rewritten. To have propelled Stot away from his intrinsic honor andinto crime, of course his torments must’ve been barbaric. And now the threats to our community mimicked his past—I was another woman he didn’t know how to protect.
“You cannot be responsible for the world,” I said into the silence.
“I can’t leave it.” His fingers absently ran along the hem of my blouse. “Pain and regret are such vicious hauntings.”
“But also, there’s a wideness in God’s mercy.”
He cocked his head. “Quoting old hymns now?”
I shrugged, my hip catching on the metal of his gun. He pulled back and unbuckled his weapon belt, set them behind. His thumb brushed across the bones of my wrist, the cleft in his chin defined in the murky light.
“You want to know what haunts me during the midnight hours?” His voice was low and resonant. “I understand the Daltons. Understand their rage and confusion, how they tried to remake the law. Emmett Dalton’s not a bad man. Just angry and misguided. Somewhere in the mist where we try to find honor and order, where we define truth, he became lost.”
“And that’s what haunts you.” I studied the line of his jaw. “Being unable to determine right or wrong. That’s the cussed awful truth, isn’t it—we can’t always know what’s just.”
Wind whistled through the high grasses, and thunder boomed in the distance. He idly brushed my wrist, across vein and bone and skin.
“So after Coffeyville, the Dalton Brothers framed you for your family’s deaths,” I said. “That’s the bloodshed from the rumors?”
“Yes.” He rocked his neck. “Among other crimes, which came later.”
We’d settled into a dreamlike gap between what was foregone and the present, a depthless gorge full of cold air and ghost-white steam. These vulnerable moments of honesty were a transient vapor. I fiddled with the button on his shirt’s paper cuff, unbuttoned and rebuttoned, the material softening. I wanted to know the specific lawlessness he’d fallen into and why he’d had a bullet wound last week. But more than that, I must know about this woman he was set to marry come spring.
And so I asked.
Chapter Thirty
The night was a gasping place full of shadow and wondering and all things deep and black. I pressed Stot’s cuff link through the buttonhole, felt the weight of his arm round my shoulder, breathed in deep through my nose.
His brother’s widow was Clara. She’d grown up with them, a portrait of refined Victorian propriety and charm. Stot had kept his kin at a distance these past years, as at any moment he could be thrown into jail or slaughtered by one outlaw band or another. “I snuck in to see my nieces before the race,” he said, “and Clara was struggling something fierce.” He removed his arm from my shoulder, scrubbed his face. “She’s never handled discord well. She grew up on a tidy estate amongst abundant farmland, and now she’s surviving on a decrepit homestead in the badlands of North Dakota, my brother long gone. I decided that establishing a safe space of my own down here, then marrying her and taking care of my nieces, was perhaps the more suitable option for them.”
Clara was a gentler sort of woman, never up for much excitement—and she was far too proper to venture across the country with a feller who wasn’t her husband. But, he supposed, as they had a fondness for each other, she would marry him and move down once he’d fashioned a house and a farm. Whenever the weather seemed fair, the first week of March or so, he planned to head on up north and propose. He asked if perhaps I’d watch over his farmwhile he was gone. Air caught beneath my rib cage, his body hot along my spine.
“So you’re not engaged but fixing to be?” I shifted to better see his face, my curved, starched collar rasping against his softer shirt.
He nodded.
“You want to marry her?” I felt each press of his body molded along mine.
His gaze wandered down my face. “It’s the proper thing to do.”
I gripped my decanter, the raised motif on the glass a coarse dent against my fingers.
“It’s unfair to my wife, marrying again.” His jaw was tight. “But I don’t love Clara. So perhaps it’s not a betrayal. I want to be a man who graciously hauls his duty. Marrying Clara and caring for my brother’s children is the honorable choice.”
It was brutal to be tugged toward him when he wasn’t for me. I felt adrift, unable to balance what felt inevitable and what would be.
“Sometimes,” he said, his body pressing along my back with his exhale, “finding the less bad in all the awful choices is harder than catching a toad in the mud.”
