The woman in blue looked at her husband. “And you never questioned it?”
“Every day,” he said. “But every man who might have helped me disappeared, or swore he knew nothing.”
She felt sorrow, then anger. His suffering was real. So was the decision to keep her ignorant of it.
The visitor opened the letter and held it out. “She survived the fire. She was taken from the building before the roof collapsed. They kept her hidden because she'd copied the genuine claims and could identify every forged signature.”
Her husband took the page with visibly shaking hands. For a long time, he merely stared at the handwriting.
The woman saw the line at the top: I am alive, and the story you were told was written by the men who stole the valley.
It was the same hand that had written the unsigned message delivered four days earlier. Her husband finally admitted he had read that first letter alone, folded it away, and spent the following nights imagining how to speak about it without losing her.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“At an abandoned relay station below the eastern pass. She escaped the men holding her only recently. She's ill, and there are riders trying to find her before the circuit judge can take her statement.”
The woman listened to the storm batter the cabin. It would have been easy to think the old wife was a ghost, a rival, an impossible return from the grave. Instead, she imagined a living woman somewhere in the cold, waiting to learn whether anyone would believe her.
“Then she needs help,” she said.
Her husband turned to her. “You don't understand what this means.”
“I understand enough. Someone is in danger. And I understand that you married me without telling me you feared your first wife might not be dead.”
He flinched. “I thought she was gone.”
“Until four days ago. Yet you said nothing. You let me sit here wondering whether my own body disgusted you.”
His face crumpled. “Never. Not once.”
“Then you should have trusted me with the truth instead of leaving me alone with the worst explanation I knew.”
He reached toward her, then stopped. For the first time she was glad he did. She was not ready to be comforted out of a question he had not answered.