“You have no idea what I protected you from,” Earl said.
“Protected?” My voice cracked.
“You’d have come home to nothing, Nora.”
“He came back broken. Half a man. A cripple with nightmares.”
Walt went very still.
“You’d have spent your whole life nursing a ruined soldier in that falling-down house,” Earl said.
“Living on scraps. Signing your land away to pay his doctor bills.”
“I kept the family together. I kept the land. I made us something.”
“You made yourself something,” I said. “Off my husband’s gra.ve.”
“Off a lie you carved in stone.”
Earl took a step toward me.
Walt moved.
Dale moved.
For one awful second I thought the whole thing would come apart in violence right there in my kitchen.
“Stop,” I said.
And they stopped.
Even now, old habits.
Even now they listened to me when I used that voice.
I turned to Earl.
“Why the letters?” I asked.
“You didn’t just lie once. You lied every week for years. You stole every word we wrote to each other.”
Earl didn’t answer.
So Walt did.
“Because one letter getting through ends it,” Walt said.
“One letter and you both know the other’s alive. The whole thing collapses. So he had to catch every single one.”
“Years of it. That takes hate, Earl. Or greed. Which was it?”
Earl’s mouth twisted.
“It was sense,” he said.
“Something you two never had a lick of.”
I looked at my brother.
Really looked at him.
The man who drove me to every meeting.
Who held my shoulder at every dead end.
Who sat beside me while I grieved a man he knew was alive.
Who let me waste a lifetime so he could keep forty acres and some mill shares.
“You sat with me,” I whispered. “At the funeral with no bo.dy. You cried, Earl. I saw you cry.”
“I did cry,” he said.
And God help me, I think he meant it.
“I cried because you wouldn’t let him go. You made it so hard.”
“You could have had a whole life. Instead you married a vending-machine ring to a de.ad man.”
