Caleb went still.

“Doctor?”

“Town physician.”

“Name?”

“Hollis.”

Caleb looked at Mave again.

Then he asked the question that shattered the morning.

“Who told you this woman was barren?”

Silas’s face changed.

Edna backed into the wall.

Mave felt the floor tilt beneath her.

“What do you mean?”

Caleb did not look away from Silas.

“I mean exactly what I said.”

Silas grabbed the paper contract lying beside his cup.

“You here to buy her or interrogate us?”

Caleb reached inside his coat.

For one terrible moment, Mave thought he might draw a gun.

Instead, he placed a leather purse on the table.

Coins struck wood.

Silas stared at them.

Caleb said, “How much?”

Edna whispered, “Caleb—”

His head snapped toward her.

She stopped.

Silas’s greed overcame his caution.

“Two hundred.”

Mave almost laughed.

Six years of marriage.

Six years of washing his clothes, feeding his family, nursing Edna through influenza, helping birth calves in freezing barns, planting vegetables, hauling water.

Two hundred dollars.

Caleb pulled another purse free.

“Three hundred.”

Silas blinked.

Mave stared at the stranger.

Caleb leaned across the table.

“But you both sign.”

“Fine.”

“And you state in writing that she leaves voluntarily and that neither of you possesses any future claim over her labor, property, earnings, inheritance, person, or name.”

Silas frowned.

“Name?”

Caleb’s eyes hardened.

“Every part of her.”

Edna suddenly whispered, “Don’t sign it.”

Silas glared.

“Shut up.”

“Silas.”

“Three hundred dollars, Ma.”

“Something’s wrong.”

Caleb almost smiled.

“Yes.”

The room went quiet.

“Something is very wrong.”

Silas signed anyway.

Greed had always been braver than wisdom.

Edna resisted until Silas shoved the pen toward her.

Finally, with trembling fingers, she added her name.

Caleb folded the paper carefully.

He placed it inside his coat.

Then he looked at Mave.

“Get whatever belongs to you.”

She almost said that nothing did.

Instead she walked upstairs.

Her room contained six years of proof that a person could exist somewhere without ever truly living there.

Two dresses.

A comb.

A sewing box.

Three letters she had written to no one and never mailed.

A wool shawl.

And beneath the mattress, wrapped in cloth, one object Edna did not know Mave had kept.

A tiny silver button.

It had appeared in her pocket after the fever six years earlier.

An anchor was engraved across its face.

Whenever she touched it, sadness came so violently that she sometimes lost her breath.

She placed the button inside her sewing box.

Then she carried her small bag downstairs.

Silas did not say goodbye.

At the doorway, Mave stopped.

Six years.

Surely six years deserved something.

She looked at him.

“Did you ever love me?”

Silas scratched at his beard.

“I fed you.”

It was such a small answer.

Such a pitiful answer.

And somehow it freed her.

Mave stepped outside.

Caleb followed.

Behind them, Edna cried, “Wait.”

Mave turned.

The old woman stood in the doorway.

For one strange second, her expression was not cruel.

It was desperate.

“Mave.”

“What?”

Edna’s lips moved.

Then Silas appeared behind her.

Whatever Edna had intended to say died.