Despite herself, Lydia whispered, “He knew that much.”
“He gave me enough cash to pay your wages through winter.”
Lydia’s eyes widened.
“You never hired me.”
“I did.”
“No.
Daniel did.”
“No.”
Silas stepped forward.
“He asked me to give you a choice.
I wrote the advertisement.
You answered it.
You came here yourself.”
“But you knew who I was from the beginning.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because Daniel said if you came, I was to wait until you trusted me.”
Her voice rose.
“And when precisely were you planning to decide that?”
Silas flinched.
That hurt her more than if he’d shouted.
He slid the envelope toward her.
“He told me not to give you this until somebody came looking for you.”
“Who?”
Silas’s eyes darkened.
“A man named Gideon Pike.”
Lydia stopped breathing.
Gideon Pike.
The banker who held Daniel’s debts.
The man who had stood beside her husband’s grave and offered condolences.
The man who had given Lydia thirty days to surrender the mill.
The man whose clerk had visited her twice afterward asking where she intended to live.
Lydia looked down at the letter.
Then tore it open.
Lydia,
If you are reading this, then I failed to come home.
Her vision blurred.
She continued.
You have every right to hate me.
But there is one thing I need you to know.
I never gambled away our money.
Lydia stopped.
She read the sentence again.
Then again.
Silas said nothing.
Her hands began trembling.
Pike needed everyone to believe I was a gambler because gamblers are easy to blame.
Three years ago I discovered that Gideon Pike had been creating false debts against farmers, widows, and miners who could not read their contracts.
When they failed to pay money they never owed, he seized their property.
I found proof.
I also discovered men who challenged him had accidents.
Lydia covered her mouth.
She remembered names.
Mr.
Willis.
Thrown from a horse.
The Harper brothers.
Killed when their mine collapsed.
Widow Keene’s husband.
Found in the river.
Daniel’s letter continued.
I began moving our money because I needed Pike to think I was desperate.
I sat at his card tables.
I drank with his men.
I borrowed from him.
I let the town call me a fool.
I am ashamed that I let you believe them too.
A sob escaped Lydia.
For months she had cursed Daniel.
She had stood at his grave wondering how he could have left her destroyed.
But the letter in her hands said something impossible.
Daniel had destroyed his own name deliberately.
The evidence is somewhere Pike cannot reach it.
Silas knows enough to protect you, though he may never forgive me for involving him.
Trust him.
And Lydia—
the money was not lost.
Neither was the mill.
