Chapter 19
NINETEEN
SAGE
The first line of the letter erases a hundred and fifty years of family history, and I read it out loud to the man I was raised to ruin.
The Ledger holds its temperature no matter the season, cool enough that I regret not grabbing a jacket, dry enough to keep paper alive since before Montana was a state. Dawson favors the bandaged forearm without meaning to, holding it stiff at his side.
“You’re supposed to be resting that arm,” I tell him, for the third time since we walked in.
“I’m not doing anything with the arm. I’m supervising.”
“You don’t supervise. You hover and call it supervising.”
Dawson doesn’t move from the table. “Hovering is a legitimate skill. I’m very good at it.”
“Hovering isn’t a medical term, Dawson.”
“Neither is you diagnosing me off a suture kit and a YouTube video.”
“I’ve stitched worse than your arm on animals twice your size. Sit down before I make you.”
He doesn’t sit down. He leans against the reading table instead, which is at least some kind of progress, and watches me work through the 1868 to 1890 shelf with the infuriating tranquility of a man who’s decided arguing with me isn’t worth the trouble this early.
We have until tonight. Knox gave Dawson twenty-four hours in The Ledger’s stone hallway before he decides what happens to Cruz, and Gideon wanted the old land surveys cross-checked against the basement request before that clock runs out, some paper trail nobody’s touched since before either of us was born.
It should have taken twenty minutes. It’s been two hours, and I keep catching myself watching the wall clock instead of the shelves, like staring at it hard enough might slow it down for Cruz’s sake.
I find the box because it’s shelved wrong, tucked one row higher than every other Blackwater correspondence file from the period, like somebody wanted it close enough to find and far enough to miss.
Plain wood, no markings. Inside, a water-stained leather folder holds the paper.
No label. A Blackwater hand from six generations back, some ancestor whose exact place on the family tree I’d have to look up, taped a scrap inside the lid, three words.
Not for filing.
“That’s ominous,” Dawson says, reading over my shoulder before I’ve even opened it.
“Everything in this room is ominous. It’s a room full of dead men’s paperwork.”
“Fair.”
I lift the top folder out and the paper inside is thinner than it should be for something a hundred and fifty years old, handled too many times, softened at the folds like cloth. The ink’s faded to rust. The handwriting is deliberate, a man who learned penmanship as a discipline instead of a habit.
Elias to Seamus. October, 1868.
I read the first line twice because my brain refuses it the first time.
I read it a third time, out loud this time, because I need to hear it in a voice that isn’t the one in my head.
“Elias to Seamus. October, 1868.” My own voice sounds wrong in this room. “My friend. He calls him my friend, Dawson.”
He crosses to me and takes the page, careful with the fragile paper, and I watch his face do the thing my own face is probably doing right now, trying to absorb information faster than what the words spell out.
The letter isn’t a rival’s correspondence.
It isn’t even civil. It’s warm. Elias Blackwater writes to Seamus Sullivan like a man he’d trust with his life, thanking him for holding land on the north parcel through a hard winter, asking after Seamus’s wife’s health, closing with a line about the third keeper agreeing to the terms discussed at the spring meeting.
“Third keeper,” Dawson says. “What third keeper?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never heard that phrase in my life, and I’ve read every family history document Gideon owns.”
He flips to the second page.
The agreement of ’68 stands, Seamus writes back, in a different hand, tucked into the same folder like somebody kept the whole correspondence together on purpose.
What the mountain gave us, we keep between the three names and no others.
You know what happens if either family speaks of it plainly.
We quarrel convincingly, or we lose everything the quarrel was meant to protect.
My legs stop being reliable. I sit down hard on the cold stone floor.
“They weren’t enemies.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.
“Dawson, they weren’t just not enemies. They were partners.
They planned this. The whole thing. The feud, the land disputes, whatever our families have been doing to each other for over a hundred and fifty years, somebody wrote instructions for it like a stage play. ”
“Instructions to quarrel convincingly.” He reads it again, out loud, like saying it twice will make it stop being true. “Sage, this isn’t a disagreement that got out of hand. This is choreography.”
My hands are shaking. I set the page down flat on my knee so he won’t see it, and he sees it anyway.
“Every fight our families have ever had.” I make myself keep talking instead of looking at my own hands.
“Every dead relative, every ruined wedding, every kid who grew up hating a name before they could spell it. The Corridor. Fourteen months of me burning your road down in county meetings. Some of that might be real. Some of it might just be two men in 1868 deciding their grandchildren needed a good enough reason to stay apart.”
Dawson crouches in front of me and takes the letter out of my hands before I crush it without meaning to. He doesn’t ask permission. He just takes it, as he takes anything he’s decided needs taking, and sets it on the table above our heads, out of reach of both of us.
“You’re thinking about us,” he says. He isn’t asking.
“I’m thinking about every summer since I was twenty.
” I make myself say it plainly, because softening it would still be lying.
“I’m thinking that if two dead men could manufacture a war good enough to survive six generations, somebody alive right now could manufacture a smaller one good enough to survive a summer.
I’m thinking about every reason I ever told myself for why you left me, and how many of those reasons I picked because they were easier than asking you. ”
“Sage.”
“Don’t.” My voice cracks on it, and I hate that it does. “Don’t tell me it’s not the same thing. I need it to not be the same thing for about five more minutes, and then you can tell me whatever you want.”
“No.” He says it hard, immovable, nothing gentle in it at all. “You don’t get five minutes of that. Not with me.”
I look up.
“You want to be furious at somebody,” he says, “be furious at somebody who can actually answer for it. I’m right here.
I’ve been right here the whole time, Sage, lying to you by leaving pieces out, and you don’t get to spend your five minutes being angry at two men who’ve been dead a more than a century so you don’t have to look at the one who’s still breathing. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“No.” He doesn’t back off it. “It’s honest. Different thing.”
I think about Nell’s chalkboard and every kid at Rimrock Elementary who picked a side at recess before they could read, a whole town raised on a war two men invented over a card table.
I think about my own wedding being called a truce instead of what it might actually be, and two long-dead founders finally getting the outcome they wanted all along.
It should feel distant, historical, something to study later.
It doesn’t. It feels like somebody reached into me and rearranged everything I thought I knew about my own name.
“I’m not sending this to my father,” I say.
He looks at me and waits.
“I found the Ledger code from the blast site last night and I didn’t send that to him either.
” I say it fast, before I can talk myself into softening it.
“I don’t know what that makes me. A bad daughter.
A worse spy. I don’t care right now. Gideon’s spent my whole life deciding what I’m allowed to know and when I’m allowed to know it, and I am done handing him the same thing he’s always done to me. ”
“Good,” Dawson says, rough and immediate, no hesitation in it at all.
“That’s it? Just good?”
“You want an argument; you’re not getting one from me this morning.”
I laugh, short and wrecked, nothing funny in it at all. “God, we’re a mess.”
“We’re the only two people in six generations who get to actually read this letter.
” He says it reverently, and the reverence goes straight through me, sharper than grief, closer to fury.
“Every kid raised on this feud, every funeral, and it’s you and me on a cold floor finding out we might have been playing parts somebody scripted before Montana was even a state. ”
“I want to be angry at somebody who’s still alive to feel it.”
His jaw sets. “Then be angry at me. I already told you why.”
I move before I decide to.
My hands are in his shirt, not gentle, not the careful hands I’ve used on his arm since I stitched him, and he lets me haul him closer with a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan, some rough thing caught between both.
He doesn’t say a word about the arm. I already have my belt working loose and unbutton my jeans.
“Get down on that rug,” I tell him. “Before I lose my nerve.”
“You don’t have nerve to lose. You have a plan and you’re already executing it.”
“Shut up, Dawson.”
“Make me.”
I do.
I push him flat onto the old horsehair rug someone left folded under the reading table decades ago, more out of practicality than romance, and I straddle him, my hands pressed into his chest. He doesn’t fight it, doesn’t try to flip us, not because his body’s asking permission but because he wants exactly this, wants my fury more than he wants control of it, his cock already straining in his denim like he’s been ready since the letter hit the floor.