5. Chapter 5
Reed
The leather folder on my passenger seat contains the deed to forty acres and a stable built better than most houses.
For five days I have told myself Imogen will understand why I bought it.
The morning after she folded my fingers shut over the ring, I called the family's land people.
Sitting with what she had said was unbearable; doing something was easier.
They found Fallow Hill inside a day. I walked the property once, signed inside four, and paid the asking price without negotiating, which the seller will be dining out on for a year.
The deed reads Imogen Mercer.
There is no Calloway on any page. No condition that she return to me. No authority retained by my family. If she takes it and never speaks to me again, the land is still hers.
For five days, that has seemed important.
Gravel announces me a quarter mile out; nothing arrives at Hart's Run unannounced. Imogen is on the cottage porch by the time I park, in barn clothes, her braid still in from the workday. She looks at the folder under my arm longer than she looks at me.
"Five minutes," I say. "Then I'll go."
She holds the door.
The front room is dim and warm off the woodstove, and the kitchen behind it holds the last of the afternoon light.
The whole cottage would fit inside our east-wing bedroom, which is not a thought I am proud of walking in with.
She puts me at the pine table. One leg is shimmed with a matchbook, and the table doesn't rock, because everything on this property is repaired by somebody who knew what they were doing.
I put the folder between us.
"I'm not here to ask for anything," I say. "I'm here to give you something. Then I'm gone."
She sits down across from me and waits. She has always been better at waiting than anyone my family ever produced.
I open the folder facing her, deed on top.
"Fallow Hill. Forty acres, and a stable I would move our best stock into tomorrow. You could have a rescue and rehabilitation operation running inside a year. Your clients. Your methods. Your name on the sign." I turn the deed toward her. "Read the name on it."
She reads it.
Her face gives me nothing.
"There is no Calloway on it," I say. "Not on the deed, not on the title work, not anywhere. My family will have no authority over one acre of it. There is no condition that you ever come back to me. It is yours if you never speak to me again."
I stop.
This sounded different in my head.
I thought she wanted independence, so I found land nobody in my family could touch. She wanted her professional name back, so I put Mercer on the deed. She wanted distance from Sorrel Gate, and Fallow Hill has it.
Across the table, Imogen still hasn't touched the paper.
"How did you find this property?"
"Through the family's land people. They've known every parcel in this county for forty years."
The words are barely out before I know why she asked.
"Fallow Hill," she says. "I know this farm, Reed. I have sat at your mother's table while she praised it. Beautiful, she called it. Very manageable." She looks up at me. "And such a convenient distance from Sorrel Gate."
I remember the dinner.
Not the date, but my mother's voice. Fallow Hill is close enough for an easy drive and far enough not to intrude. I had heard nothing wrong with the remark then.
Imogen's hands remain in her lap.
I look down at the deed with her name on it and see what I brought to her door.
A house chosen by my people. Land already approved by my mother. Near enough to remain inside the orbit of the family she left.
"You bought me a beautiful exile," she says.
There is no anger in her voice. I almost wish there were.
"That was not my intention."
"I know." She says it immediately. "I believe you. That has never been the trouble."
I have an answer ready before I realize there is nothing in her sentence to argue with.
She believes I meant well.
She left anyway.
Imogen looks down at the deed once more, then back at me.
"The dinners weren't the worst of it, Reed.
The worst part was what happened afterward.
I would sit there knowing something had been cruel, and by the time we were alone you would have explained why making more of it would only cause trouble.
After enough years of that, I stopped trusting myself as quickly as I should have. "
My throat tightens.
She keeps going.
"I stopped bringing things to you unless I was sure I could defend being hurt by them.
Then I started wondering whether I was the difficult one before anyone else had to suggest it.
Somewhere along the way, I became the person who had to stay reasonable so everybody else could keep behaving exactly as they always had. "
She looks toward the window for a moment.
"And every time I told you something was wrong, I needed you to believe me before you decided whether fixing it would inconvenience your family."
Her voice never rises.
I was raised to hear a raised voice as the sound of failure. I sit at her small table wishing she would shout at me, because I would know what to do with anger aimed straight at my chest.
This quiet is worse.
"I won't take the farm, Reed."
I close the folder.
My first impulse is immediate: another property. Somewhere farther away. Somewhere found without my family's help.
I almost say it.
Then I look at her.
That is exactly what I did before coming here. She told me I did not see the problem, and I went out and found a more expensive answer.
My hand stays on the closed folder.
"I don't know how to repair what I've done," I say.
The admission leaves me with nothing to hide behind.
Imogen studies me for a moment. I don't try to guess what she sees.
Then she nods once.
Nothing in it promises anything.
I stand. I take the folder with me. Leaving it on her table would only make her refuse me again after I was gone.
She walks me the four steps to the door, because the cottage is that small and her manners are that good.
The light is going as I drive out. Gravel gives me away down the lane, past the creek and the sycamores. The county road runs eight quiet miles home, and the folder rides unopened on the passenger seat.
The gates stand open when I reach Sorrel Gate. My headlights climb the brick piers, and I pass beneath the farm's name in wrought iron.
I have driven under it thousands of times.
Tonight I slow.
For years, when my mother hurt Imogen, I thought the choice in front of me was whether to defend my wife or make a public scene. So I chose neither. I took Imogen's hand. I spoke to my mother later. I told myself I had protected both of them.
But Imogen was the only one who ever had to change her behavior afterward.
My mother kept speaking.
The dinners kept happening.
And I kept asking my wife to endure them.
I pull up in front of the house and shut off the engine.
The folder sits beside me, forty acres chosen with the same certainty that has guided me all my life.
For the first time, I don't trust that certainty.