Chapter 3
The call had lasted forty minutes and she could not have told anyone what was in it.
That was the truth of it. She'd sat on the mudroom bench in her coat with her boots still on and let him talk, and at some point she had stopped listening to the words and started listening to the fact of him talking, which was the thing she had wanted for twelve years and was now getting for the worst reason available.
He hadn't asked to come up. He hadn't asked her to come home. Twice he'd said I know when she said something ugly, and both times he'd meant it.
At the end he said, "Sleep."
"Don't tell me what to do."
"Okay," he said. "Please sleep."
She'd hung up and lain on top of a bare mattress under two horse blankets and slept six hours without waking once, which she had not managed since October.
Morning came in over the ridge at a quarter past seven and the whole east side of the valley went pink and gold, and Tess stood at the kitchen window with instant coffee and watched it and thought, with real venom, don't you dare.
Because that was the thing about Elkhorn.
It did not care. Eight thousand feet of not caring.
It had been doing this since before there were Thayers and it would do it after, and she had spent twelve years driving up here to get her lungs back and now she lived here, apparently, and it was still just going to be beautiful at her every morning.
The house was cold in the corners and warm near the stove.
Her grandmother-in-law's mudroom, her grandmother-in-law's ugly brown sink, forty years of somebody else's family in every room, and the one thing in the building that was Tess's own was a wall of the tack room where she'd kept the trip board.
She went and looked at it before she'd eaten anything.
The board was still up. Cork, four feet by six, and the last thing pinned to it was a routing sheet from twelve years ago, sun-bleached to nothing. Nine people. Six days. Her handwriting, back when her handwriting was good.
She stood there a while.
Then, because she was apparently going to be stupid about it, she took down the pack saddle on the end hook to see if she could.
It weighed about thirty-five pounds. She had thrown that saddle onto a horse ten thousand times.
She got both hands on it, took the weight off the hook, and her right shoulder went out from under her like a bad step on a stair — no pain at first, just nothing there, a hole where the muscle was supposed to answer — and the saddle came down and took a curry comb and a coffee can of horseshoe nails with it.
The nails went everywhere. That was the part that undid her. Four hundred horseshoe nails skating across a plank floor in every direction, and Tess standing in the middle of it holding her own elbow.
She got down on her knees and started picking them up one at a time with her left hand.
It took twenty minutes. She was careful and slow, and when the can was full she put it back on the shelf and put the saddle back on the hook, which she could do, because lifting it up onto something was different than holding it out.
Then she went and found something to eat, which turned out to be crackers.
Toni came up the drive at ten thirty with the flatbed and a truck bed of groceries under a tarp.
"You didn't have to do that."
"I called the store in Steamboat and asked what a person eats," Toni said, dropping the tailgate. "They said food. So I got food."
There were nine bags. Tess counted them because she counted things, and then made herself stop counting them.
They put it all away together, which took a while, because Toni had bought for a family of six and the kitchen was set up for a caretaker who came twice a month. Rice. A whole flat of eggs. Four kinds of beans. Coffee that was not instant.
"Sit down," Toni said, when it was done. "You're gray."
"I'm fine."
"Tess."
Tess sat down.
Toni pulled out the chair across from her, turned it around, and sat on it backward the way she had been sitting on chairs since she was twenty-three, and looked at her for a long moment.
"Okay," she said. "Tell it."
So Tess told it. All of it, flat, in order, the way you'd give a report to a sheriff. The adjuster. The gate log. Code 4. The seven times. Ninety seconds. Six weeks, no sex, a woman on salary in a car outside a hangar in Casper.
Toni listened without moving, and she did not say oh honey, which is why Tess had been able to tell her.
When it was done Toni said, "Get a lawyer today."
"Toni."
"Today. Not a good one, not the right one, not the one somebody recommends. Today. Call the first name you find in Steamboat and give them a retainer so somebody in this world is standing on your side of the line."
"Nothing's happening yet."
"Something is always happening," Toni said. "That's what those people are. There's no room in that family where nothing is happening."
Tess turned her cup around on the table.
"He says he didn't see the calls."
Toni didn't answer.
"You think he's lying."
"I think," Toni said carefully, "that I've known you since you were twenty-two and you have never once in nineteen years asked me whether you should believe somebody. You're not asking me now, either. You're asking me to agree with you."
"That's not fair."
"It's completely fair, it's just not nice."
They sat with that.
"He was going to tell me at Christmas," Tess said.
"Yeah," said Toni. "I heard that part. I'm still thinking about it."
Whit called at one.
He never called. In twelve years the man had called her personally maybe six times, and four of those had been about a scheduling matter he could have had someone else handle, and had chosen not to, because a call from Whit Thayer was a thing he liked people to receive.
"Tess. I'm not going to keep you."
"Whit."
"I've spoken with Porter." A pause with exactly the right amount of weight in it. "I want you to know that I don't intend to involve myself. I've never been one to get in the middle of a marriage."
"That's good of you."
"It's not, particularly. It's just that they resolve themselves." He let that sit. "Are you comfortable up there? Is the boiler behaving? It's an old system, that house."
"It's fine."
"I ask because you've had a very difficult autumn, and Elkhorn in December is a lot of house for one person.
" A small, warm, terrible laugh. "Porter's mother went to Palm Springs one winter.
Nineteen ninety-four, I think. She had a marvelous time and she came back in March and neither of us ever mentioned it again. Best thing she ever did for herself."
Tess held very still.
"I'm not comparing," Whit said gently. "I'm only saying that a hard season is not the same thing as a decision, and I'd hate to see anyone make a large permanent choice while they're still healing. You've been through something enormous. It would be a shame."
"Whit."
"Yes?"
She could have said any of ten things. She said, "Thank you for calling."
"Of course. And Tess — the family's very fond of you. That's never been in question. Not once."
He hung up.
It took her the better part of an hour to fully unpack it, standing in the tack room with a bridle in her hands, and when it came apart it came apart all at once.
Not once, said like a man defending her from an accusation nobody had made.
A large permanent choice. Palm Springs. A hard season is not the same thing as a decision.
He had called to tell her to wait it out, and to let her know that her leaving would be understood as an episode, and to mention, in passing, whose house she was standing in.
Not one impolite word in the whole of it.
And the part about the house was not even a threat.
That was what she kept turning over. Whit did not have to threaten her about Elkhorn, because Whit did not think of Elkhorn as something a person could be threatened about.
It was a family property. His grandfather had bought the water rights.
His mother had died in the room Tess had slept in last night.
The deed said Porter and Tess Thayer, jointly. Tess had signed it at a kitchen island in Cherry Hills twelve years ago with a pen somebody handed her, and had thought, at the time, how nice.
She had never once, in all the years since, thought of the place as hers. She had thought of it as where she went.
That was worth knowing about herself. She stood in the tack room and let herself know it.
The world started calling that afternoon, which was how she learned it was already out.
The first was Camille Fenwick, who was on the foundation board and who had never once called Tess's cell in twelve years.
Camille was just checking in. Camille had heard you'd gone up to the ranch, which sounds heavenly.
Camille wanted her to know that if she ever wanted to have lunch, just the two of them, no agenda, Camille was there.
"That's kind," Tess said, and got off.
The second was a woman she'd sat next to at maybe two hundred dinners and could not have picked out of a lineup on the street.
That one didn't bother with heavenly. That one got to it in ninety seconds, which was becoming the unit of measurement for the week, and said that her sister had used a firm in Denver that was very aggressive and very discreet, and would Tess like the name.
"Where did you hear it," Tess said.
A tiny hitch. "Oh — I don't— you know how it is."
"I don't, actually. Who told you."
"Tess, I really only called to be kind."
"Sure," Tess said. "Who told you."
The woman said something about how she'd be thinking of her and got off the phone fast.
Tess put the phone face down on the counter and stood there with her hands flat on either side of it.
Twenty hours. She hadn't told anyone but Toni.
Porter hadn't told anyone but Marin, and Marin was not the type to leak a thing that took her down with it.
Which meant it had come out of the office, or the house, or a driver, or a person who did the flowers, and it did not actually matter which one, because the point was already made.