Tonight, he had done the opposite.
“What aren’t you telling us?”
Daniel looked at her.
“Nothing.”
There.
That pause.
Lydia knew it.
“You’re lying.”
“Lyd—”
“Don’t call me that.”
Daniel went silent.
She stepped closer.
“You didn’t start correcting these records because I was pregnant.”
His face changed.
Silas noticed too.
Lydia continued.
“You were already moving property back months before I conceived.”
She pointed at dates in the ledger.
“I saw them.”
Daniel’s eyes closed.
“Why?”
No answer.
“Why, Daniel?”
Finally he whispered:
“Because Vale killed someone.”
Silas stiffened.
“Who?”
Daniel looked at his brother.
“Our father.”
Silas went absolutely still.
Lydia stared between them.
Silas’s father had supposedly died eight years earlier after falling from a logging bridge.
Daniel continued.
“Father discovered what Vale and I were doing.”
“You told me Father died drunk.”
“He wasn’t drunk.”
Silas’s face emptied of emotion.
“He confronted Vale.”
Daniel’s eyes filled with something Lydia had never seen there before.
Shame.
“I was there.”
Silas took one step forward.
“You watched him die?”
“I tried to stop it.”
“Did you?”
Daniel’s silence answered.
Silas seized him and threw him against the wall.
The cabin shook.
“Silas!”
Lydia grabbed his arm.
Daniel coughed violently.
“I was twenty-two!”
Silas’s fist drew back.
“You were old enough.”
“Yes!”
Daniel shouted it.
“Yes, I was.”
The brothers stared at each other.
“I have spent eight years knowing exactly what kind of man I was that night.”
Daniel’s voice broke.
“That is why I started keeping records. That is why I kept copies. Not because I became good. Because I became afraid.”
Silas released him.
Daniel slid downward.
Lydia suddenly understood.
Daniel had not been a good man corrupted by Gideon Vale.
He had been a guilty man who discovered too late that guilt eventually demands payment.
The realization hurt.
But strangely, it also freed something inside her.
She no longer had to defend the husband she remembered.
She only had to decide what to do with the man sitting before her.
Then a horse neighed outside.
Silas turned.
Daylight had not yet arrived.
“They’re early.”
Gideon Vale came to the mountain wearing a black wool coat that probably cost more than Silas’s cabin.
Six armed men stood behind him.
Lydia knew two.
One had auctioned her furniture.
The other had visited her three days after Daniel’s funeral and told her a woman in her condition should be grateful the bank wasn’t throwing her into the street.
Now he looked uncomfortable seeing her standing behind Silas Croft with a rifle in her hands.
Vale smiled.
“Mrs. Marsh.”
Lydia’s stomach turned.
“You seem disappointed to find me alive.”
“Quite the opposite.”
His gaze moved toward Daniel.
“Well.”
Daniel stepped onto the porch.
Vale’s expression sharpened.
“The dead remain troublesome.”
Silas leveled his rifle.
“State your business.”
Vale smiled.
“You know my business.”
“Then state it anyway.”
“The documents.”
Silas’s finger rested near the trigger.
“No.”
Vale sighed.
“You mountain men do adore simple answers.”
His eyes returned to Lydia.
“Has Daniel told you everything?”
Daniel stiffened.
Lydia noticed.
Vale smiled wider.
“Apparently not.”
“Shut up,” Daniel said.
“Oh, she deserves to know.”
Silas looked between them.
“What?”
Vale’s voice became almost gentle.
“Daniel didn’t merely work for me.”
Daniel’s face went white.
“Gideon.”
“He designed the entire scheme.”
Lydia stared at her husband.
Vale continued.
“The false mortgages. The shell companies. Even the courthouse fire.”
“That’s a lie.”
Daniel stepped forward.
Vale laughed.
“You see? Still performing.”
He looked at Lydia.
“Ask him whose idea it was to burn the records.”
