“My doorway,” Catherine corrected.
Thomas grinned.
“—but there’s a boy sitting on a wagon down the road staring at us.”
Jud spun around.
A wagon waited near the gate.
A thin twelve-year-old boy with dark hair sat beside the driver.
Jud stared.
“You said he was coming this summer,” Catherine whispered.
“I didn’t know it meant today.”
The boy climbed down.
For several seconds neither father nor son moved.
Then Noah reached inside his coat.
He withdrew a small wooden horse.
Jud’s face collapsed.
The boy whispered something.
Too softly for Catherine to hear.
Jud walked toward him.
Then faster.
Noah ran.
They met halfway.
Jud fell to his knees and wrapped both arms around his son.
Catherine began crying.
Thomas put one arm around her shoulders.
“Was it worth it?” he asked quietly.
She looked at him.
“The mountain?”
“The ledger. The storm. All of it.”
Catherine watched Jud hold the son he had buried in his heart six years before.
She looked at Thomas alive beside her.
At the June sunlight touching mountains that had nearly killed her.
At the gallows rope, removed months ago and burned.
At the world that powerful men had nearly convinced them belonged only to those wealthy enough to purchase justice.
Then she remembered something Thomas had told her years ago.
The truth was expensive.
He had been right.
It had cost six years.
Blood.
Scars.
A winter crossing.
A burned home.
A stolen ledger.
And almost two lives.
But Catherine finally understood the part her brother had never said.
The truth was expensive because lies were profitable.
That was why men like Gideon Vale defended them so fiercely.
And why ordinary people sometimes had to risk everything to destroy them.
Catherine rested her head against Thomas’s shoulder.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“It was worth it.”
Thomas smiled.
Below them, Jud finally stood.
Noah still held his hand.
Father and son began walking toward Catherine.
For the first time since she had collapsed in the snow, Catherine no longer felt as though she were racing against death.
She was standing still.
Waiting.
And everything she had almost died to save was coming home to her.
The brother the law had tried to murder.
The man the world had declared dead.
The child a criminal empire had failed to erase.
Jud stopped before Catherine and held out his free hand.
She took it.
Behind them rose the mountains.
Beautiful.
Merciless.
Impossible.
The same mountains that had tried to bury Catherine alive had instead carried her toward the one man capable of proving Thomas innocent.
And the ledger she had believed would save only her brother had uncovered something far greater.
It had returned a dead man’s name.
It had broken a judge’s empire.
It had reunited a father with his son.
And it had revealed the secret no court, sheriff, grave marker, or burning page had been powerful enough to destroy:
Elias Mercer had never been murdered.
He had simply been waiting in the mountains for the woman brave enough to bring him back to life.
