Clara looked at the horse for a long moment.
“Mercy’s son.”
A smile touched her face.
“How about Grace?”
Jedediah laughed.
“That is a terrible name for a stallion.”
“Why?”
“He bit Owen yesterday.”
“Owen deserved it.”
“He was carrying oats.”
“He was carrying them too slowly.”
Jedediah laughed again.
It was an unfamiliar sound around Cross Ranch.
Several men turned to look.
He ignored them.
Then Clara became serious.
“There’s something else.”
Jedediah glanced at her.
She reached into her pocket.
For one terrifying instant he expected another letter.
Instead she held out Thomas’s watch.
Jedediah stared at it.
“I think this belongs to you.”
He did not take it.
“No.”
“Jedediah—”
“He gave it away.”
“To my father under circumstances neither of them chose.”
“Still.”
Clara looked confused.
Jedediah closed her fingers around the watch.
“Thomas spent the last days of his life trying to put the truth into somebody’s hands.”
His voice roughened.
“Turns out he picked the right family.”
Clara looked down at the watch.
For a long moment neither spoke.
Then a rider appeared on the southern road.
A boy.
Perhaps seven years old.
He rode a little sorrel pony, accompanied by an elderly woman in a wagon.
Clara stiffened.
Jedediah noticed.
“You know them?”
She did not answer.
The wagon stopped.
The woman climbed down.
The boy jumped from his pony and ran straight toward Clara.
“Mama!”
Jedediah forgot how to breathe.
The child threw himself into Clara’s arms.
She held him fiercely.
Then looked over his head toward Jedediah.
Fear had entered her face for the first time since the day she arrived.
Real fear.
Jedediah stared at the boy.
Dark hair.
Brown eyes.
A small crooked smile.
A smile he had seen every day of his childhood.
No.
Clara stood.
“Jedediah…”
He could barely form the words.
“How old is he?”
Clara’s face crumpled.
“Seven in August.”
The world became silent.
Thomas had died six years and eight months earlier.
Jedediah looked at the child again.
At the shape of his jaw.
At the way one eyebrow lifted higher than the other.
Thomas used to do that.
Always when he was nervous.
Jedediah stepped backward.
“No.”
Clara’s eyes filled with tears.
“He’s not yours.”
“I know that.”
The boy looked between them.
Clara knelt.
“Samuel, go help Mrs.
Porter with the bags.”
“But—”
“Please.”
The boy reluctantly walked toward the wagon.
Jedediah could not move.
“Thomas?”
Clara nodded.
“Thomas was his father.”
Jedediah stared at her.
Every revelation of the last months suddenly seemed small.
“You and Thomas…”
“For less than a year.”
“You never told me.”
“I came here to prove my father wasn’t responsible for his death.”
“You brought me his watch.
His letter.
You stood in my house and never told me I had a nephew.”
“I was going to.”
“When?”
“When I knew what kind of man you were.”
The words struck hard.
Jedediah’s anger rose—
then stopped.
Because he understood.
Clara had grown up with a father destroyed by the Cross family.
She had read Thomas’s warning.
Don’t let Jed become Father.
And when she arrived, what had she found?
A hard man.
An angry man.
