Chapter 4: What Love Leaves Behind
The Things That Cannot Be Taken
The six weeks in Mexico were the best weeks of their lives.
Neither of them said this while they were happening because saying it felt like tempting something.
But it was true.
The small house at the edge of the town became, over six weeks, something neither of them had expected it to become.
A home.
Not in the permanent sense.
In the sense of a place that held you correctly.
The mornings were long and warm, and the light came in from the east hills in a way that made the back porch the right place to be with coffee and quiet and the particular unhurried quality of a day that had not yet made any demands.
Lucas worked on his thesis in the mornings at the table on the porch.
Nadia read and made notes, called her grandfather every Sunday, called her mother every Wednesday, and in the evenings cooked things in the small kitchen that the kitchen seemed to have been designed for, the smells filling the house in the way of places where someone was making something with care.
They walked in the evenings through the town and then further into the hills when the air was cooler, and the light was the particular gold of the hour before dark.
They were known in the town as the quiet American couple.
The ones who bought their vegetables from the market on Saturday mornings and said thank you in Spanish, which was not perfect but was sincere, and who left good tips at the small restaurant on the plaza where they ate on Friday evenings, because Friday had become their evening, the way Thursday had been their evening in Arizona.
They were happy.
Not the distracted happiness of people who had forgotten what was waiting.
The deliberate happiness of people who understood that the time they had was exactly the time they had and that spending it in the presence of everything good and right about their life was not an indulgence but a kind of clarity.
In the fourth week, Nadia told Lucas something she had known for ten days and had been carrying in the particular way of something too large and too important to say carelessly.
They were on the back porch.
The morning was warm.
His coffee was in his hand, hers was on the table, and she was looking at the hills the way she looked at things she had decided to say.
She said she was pregnant.
She said it simply.
The way he had always loved was how she said important things.
He put down his coffee.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
He said when did you know.
She said ten days ago.
He said ten days.
She said she had needed the ten days to be certain before she said it out loud.
He said are you certain now.
She said yes.
He was quiet for a moment.
The hills were doing their morning thing in the east.
He said his grandfather was going to be completely impossible about this.
She said her grandfather was going to cry.
He said yes.
He said Daniel was going to cry, and it was going to be the best thing he had ever seen.
She looked at him.
He was smiling.
Not the controlled measured expression of someone managing their reaction.
The full version.
The one she had seen more often in Mexico than in all the months before it combined.
She said are you alright.
He said he was the best he had ever been.
He said that was not a small statement from someone who had spent the last several months in the middle of something that required everything he had.
He said this is the best I have ever been.
She put her hand over his on the arm of the chair.
He turned his hand over and held hers.
They sat in the Mexican morning with the coffee going slightly cold and the hills in the east and the ordinary miraculous fact of a new life that had decided, without asking anyone’s permission, to arrive in the middle of everything.
Lucas called his grandfather that afternoon.
William Voss was in Montana.
He had been in Montana for three weeks.
He and Daniel Hargrove had found the man from the Crawford ranch.
He was old, and he was not well, but he was clear.
His name was Emmett.
He had worked on the Crawford property adjacent to the Harmon land for eight years in the time of the incident and he had seen Robert Harmon’s car on the road between the two towns on the afternoon of the day James and Sarah were found and he had not understood what it meant and had not known it mattered and had carried it the way people carried things they did not know the weight of until someone told them.
Franklin had taken his statement.
The statement, combined with the documents, the vehicle registration, and the shell company trace, had given the department contact enough to move the inquiry to the next stage.
The next stage involved Montana law enforcement.
The next stage involved people with authority that Franklin did not have.
The next stage was the machine in motion.
William said it was moving.
He said slowly.
He said, but it was moving.
Lucas told his grandfather about the pregnancy.
The phone was quiet for a long time.
Lucas said grandfather.
William said I am here.
He said he was here, and he was not going to pretend he was not crying because he was past the age where pretending served anyone.
He said Lucas.
He said this is everything.
He said whatever else is happening, whatever comes next, this is everything.
He said, tell that girl that she has made an old man feel something he had not expected to feel again.
Lucas said he would.
He said grandfather there is something else.
He said he needed his grandfather to tell Daniel.
He said he wanted Daniel to know.
William said he was sitting across the kitchen table from Daniel right now.
He said he could tell him himself.
Lucas said then tell him.
There was a pause on the line.
Then he heard his grandfather say, in the voice that was different now from the voice it had been before Montana, the voice of a man who had set something down and found the setting down had not emptied him but made room, he heard his grandfather say Daniel.
He heard his grandfather tell Daniel Hargrove that Nadia was pregnant.
He heard, through a phone line from a small house in Mexico to a kitchen in Montana, the sound of Daniel Hargrove hearing that his granddaughter was going to have a child.
He heard what that sounded like.
He would not describe it to anyone for a long time because it was the kind of sound that belonged to the person who made it and should not be repeated secondhand.
He only said to Nadia that evening on the porch that her grandfather had said something.
She said what?
He said that some things that were broken could be fixed after all.
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said that was Daniel Hargrove all the way through.
He said yes.
She said he would say a thing like that.
He said yes.
She leaned against him on the porch, and they watched the Mexican evening do its slow gold thing over the western hills and said nothing else for a while because nothing else was needed.
They were found in the fifth week.
Not by the authorities they had been waiting for.
Not by Franklin with news of the inquiry.
Not by their families, with the word that it was safe to come home.
By Robert Harmon’s man.
The one who had been outside the library.
The one who had followed them through three states and lost them at the border and then, with the patience that was apparently a Harmon inheritance across generations, found them again.
He had not followed them into Mexico.
He had not needed to.
He had simply maintained contact with the network of people whose job was to know where things were, and the network had known where to look, and what it found was a quiet American couple in a town in the Mexican interior that had been too peaceful for too long and was therefore notable to anyone who was looking for notable.
He did not act immediately.
He was a professional.
He assessed.
He watched.
He determined that acting directly was not available to him in the way it might have been in other contexts.
What was available to him was a different kind of action.
The kind that was outsourced.
He made a call.
The call connected him to a man in the region who had resources and who had been in business with the Harmon family’s interests in Mexico for long enough that the call was received as routine.
He said there were two people.
He said he needed them contained.
He said contained did not mean harmed.
He said contained meant held until further instructions.
He said there was a payment that would reflect the gravity of the request.
The man on the other end of the call was not a man who asked questions when the payment was sufficient.
He said he would handle it.
Miguel came to the house on a Thursday morning at six.
He did not knock.
He had told them when they arrived that if he came without being asked, it meant something required immediate attention.
Lucas was already awake.
He heard the footstep on the path, and he was at the door before Miguel reached it.
Miguel said they needed to go.
He said there were men in the town who were not looking for vegetables at the market.
He said he recognised the kind of look they were giving.
He said he had seen it before, what came after it, and they needed to go before what came after it arrived.
Lucas said how long.
Miguel said not long.
Lucas said alright.
He went inside.
He woke Nadia.
She was awake before he said anything.
She had heard Miguel’s voice.
She sat up and looked at him; he looked at her, and neither of them said the things there was no time to say.
They packed in twelve minutes.
The essentials.
The documents Franklin had asked them to keep copies of.
Lucas’s laptop with the files.
The photograph from his desk.
They did not pack everything.
There was no time for everything.
Miguel drove them to the edge of the town in his truck and gave them directions and a name.
The name was a man at a checkpoint near the border, whom Miguel vouched for and who could get them through on a route that was not the official crossing.
He said take this road.
He said two hours.
He said do not stop.
He said he was sorry he could not come with them.
He said his age and his hip would make him more problem than a help on a two-hour drive at speed.
He said William Voss had been his friend for fifteen years.
He said tell him Miguel kept his word.
Lucas said he would.
He shook Miguel’s hand.
Nadia held Miguel’s hand in both of hers for a moment.
She said thank you.
Miguel said go.
They went.
They called their families from the road.
Not to explain.
There was no time to explain.
Lucas called Franklin.
He said they were moving.
He said Mexico was compromised.
He said they were going to the border.
He said he had a contact Miguel had given him.
Franklin said listen.
He said the inquiry had moved faster than expected.
He said there were people in Montana law enforcement who were now formally involved.
He said he had been about to call this morning with exactly this news.
He said if they could get to the American side, the situation would be different.
He said some people could help them on the American side.
He said people with authority and the authority to use it.
He said get to the border.
He said he would make calls.
He said how long.
Lucas said two hours if the road was clear.
Franklin said he would have someone at the crossing.
He said go.
Lucas drove.
The Mexican road was empty at six in the morning, the desert on both sides of it still in the early light, the mountains small in the distance, and the sky above them enormous and pink at the horizon and darkening to blue above that.
Nadia had her phone to her ear.
She was calling her grandfather.
He answered on the first ring.
He had not been asleep.
She said they were moving.
She said they were going to the border.
She said she needed him to come.
She said she needed both grandfathers.
She said she needed them at the border.
She said she knew it was a long way.
She said please.
She heard him say one word.
Coming.
He ended the call.
She looked at Lucas.
He was driving with both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road.
She said both grandfathers were coming.
He nodded.
He said Franklin was making calls.
He said there would be people at the crossing.
She said alright.
He drove.
The road was clear.
The desert was quiet.
The morning light was coming in from the east, the way it always came, gradually and then completely, and the landscape around them was the kind of landscape that did not acknowledge human urgency because it had been here longer than any urgency and would be here after.
Nadia put her hand on her stomach.
Just for a moment.
A brief, quiet gesture that was not a gesture for anyone.
Just the placement of a hand.
Then she put it back in her lap and looked at the road.
Lucas reached across and put his hand over hers.
He did not say anything.
She held it.
They drove toward the border with an hour to go, the morning fully arrived around them, the road still empty, and both of them were thinking, separately and together, about the same things.
About Montana.
About the porch that faced west.
About an east-facing porch in Mexico and six weeks of mornings that had been the best weeks of their lives.
About two old men in a kitchen in Montana, and the sound of one of them crying at the news that was the best kind of news.
About the child who had decided to arrive in the middle of everything and had not asked anyone’s permission, and would not have listened if it had been given.
About the road ahead.
About what was at the end of it.
About everything that had happened in the past three months had been moving toward.
About whether moving toward the right thing was enough when the right thing was this hard to reach.
Lucas said her name.
She said yes.
He said I love you.
She said I know.
She said I love you, too.
He said whatever happens at the border.
She said whatever happens at the border.
He said we did the right thing.
She said we did the right thing.
He said all of it.
She said all of it.
He held her hand.
She held his.
The border was thirty minutes ahead.
Robert Harmon’s man had not expected them to move so quickly.
He had expected to have until the afternoon before the people he had called were in position.
He did not have until the afternoon.
He had the next ninety minutes.
He made a second call.
He said the situation had accelerated.
He said the two Americans were moving.
He said they were heading for the border.
The man on the other end of the second call said he would send people ahead.
He said he had contacts at the border route that was not the official crossing.
He said if they were using that route, he could have people there before them.
He said it would cost more.
He said the cost was not the question.
He said the question was what he wanted done when they were intercepted.
Robert Harmon’s man was quiet for a moment.
He was a professional.
He understood that professionals had lines.
He understood that he was approaching a line.
He thought about his instructions.
He thought about what the Harmon family had asked of him across the years.
He thought about what contained meant.
He thought about whether contained was still what was on offer.
He thought about the documents.
He thought about the inquiry that he knew was open because the Harmon family knew it was open.
He thought about the man from the Crawford ranch.
He thought about everything that was in motion that could not be stopped by two people being contained.
He thought about what stopping it actually required.
He understood, with the clarity of a professional who had done this long enough to know what the next step was before he took it, what stopping it required.
He gave the instruction.
He said they needed to not reach the American side.
He said, however, that it was achieved.
He ended the call.
He sat in his car in the Mexican morning.
He had crossed a line.
He understood this.
He sat with the understanding for a moment.
Then he put the car in gear and drove north toward the border because wherever this ended, he needed to not be in this town when it ended.
The crossing Miguel had described was a gap in the fence line at the end of a dirt track that ran off the main road two miles south of the official border station.
A man named Cesario was supposed to be there.
Miguel’s contact.
The man who could get them through.
They took the turn off the main road at seven forty in the morning.
The dirt track was rough, and the car moved slowly over it, kicking up dust in the dry morning air.
Lucas watched the track.
Nadia watched the sides of the track.
The desert on both sides was scrub and rock, and the occasional outline of a plant that had decided to exist here regardless of the conditions.
He said how far.
She said the directions said half a mile.
He drove.
The half mile took three minutes on the track.
At the end of the half mile, there was the fence line.
And a man was standing beside a truck.
He was not Cesario.
Cesario was sixty, and Miguel had said he would be wearing a red jacket because he was always cold even in the desert.
This man was younger.
He was not wearing red.
There were two other men behind the truck.
Lucas stopped the car.
He stopped it far enough from the truck that the truck was not between him and the way back.
He put it in reverse.
The man beside the truck moved.
Not toward them.
To the side.
Into the scrub.
Lucas said hold on.
He reversed.
The two men behind the truck moved.
They were faster than the car on the rough track.
One of them had something in his hands.
Lucas reversed faster.
The car lurched over the rough ground.
He heard something.
He felt the car pull to the left.
A tyre.
He kept reversing.
The car would not go straight now.
He kept going anyway.
He got the car back to the junction with the main road and turned and drove on the flat tyre at a speed that was not possible on a flat tyre because the alternative was not possible either.
Nadia had her phone to her ear.
She was calling Franklin.
She got through.
She said the crossing was compromised.
She said there were men there.
She said they had a flat tyre.
She said they were on the main road going north toward the official crossing.
Franklin said how far.
She said two miles.
Franklin said he was on with the contact.
He said they were going to meet them at the official crossing.
He said keep going.
She said they had a flat tyre.
Franklin said keep going anyway.
She said alright.
She lowered the phone.
She looked at Lucas.
He was driving on the rim now.
The car was slower and pulling, and everything in it was noisy.
She said two miles.
He said I know.
He drove.
The rim scraped, the car shook, and he kept it on the road through the particular force of not accepting the alternative.
The official crossing came into view at the end of the road.
The barrier.
The booth.
The American flag on the other side of it.
He drove toward it.
He got five hundred metres from it.
He got three hundred.
He got one hundred.
He heard something behind them.
He did not look.
He drove.
Fifty metres from the barrier, the car stopped.
Not slowly.
Completely.
The engine did not cut out.
Something else happened to the car that he did not understand and did not have time to understand.
He said get out.
She was already opening the door.
They got out of the car on opposite sides.
She came around the front of the car to him.
He took her hand.
They ran.
Fifty metres.
Forty.
The barrier was right there.
The booth was right there.
He could see someone in the booth.
He could see the uniform.
He was running with everything he had and she was beside him with everything she had and the barrier was thirty metres away and then twenty and he could hear someone behind them and he thought they were going to make it and he thought the fifty metres was going to be enough and he thought about what Franklin had said about people with authority on the American side and he thought they were going to make it and then the world did something that the world should not have been able to do.
It stopped.
Not for him.
For her.
He felt it through her hand before he understood what had happened.
A change in the way she was moving.
A change in the quality of her presence beside him.
He turned.
He turned, and what he saw was the thing he would not describe for the rest of his life to anyone who had not been there because describing it was giving it to someone who had not earned carrying it.
He did not run anymore.
He stopped.
He went back.
He went to her.
He was with her on the ground. He was saying her name. She was looking at him with the eyes that had been looking at him since a Tuesday morning in an Arizona classroom, the eyes that had catalogued him, read him, found him, chosen him; those eyes were open and finding him, and he was saying her name.
She put her hand on his face.
She said his name.
She said it once.
The way she said things that mattered.
Simply.
Without decoration.
He took her hand on his face and held it there.
The world around them was noise and movement and authority arriving in the form of uniforms and vehicles and the sounds that came with them.
None of it reached him.
He was with her.
He was saying her name.
He said her name until there was no more name to say.
And then he held her hand on his face even after, he did not let go, and the world continued being its noise around him, and the Mexican morning continued being itself and the American flag on the other side of the barrier continued being what it was, permanent and indifferent and entirely unaware of the two people on the ground in front of it.
He held her hand on his face.
He did not let go.
They found him still there when the families arrived.
Both families.
Daniel Hargrove had driven through the night.
William Voss had come in a vehicle arranged by Franklin’s contact.
They arrived together.
Two old men who had not been in the same place for twenty years, arriving at the border of the country they both came from on a morning that was the worst morning either of them had ever had, and standing together in it because standing together was the only thing available.
Daniel saw his granddaughter.
He went to her.
He knelt beside her on the hard desert ground, a seventy-three year old man with bad knees, and he knelt without thinking about his knees, he put his hand on her face, and he said her name the way she had said Lucas’s name, once, simply, without decoration.
William went to Lucas.
He put his hand on his grandson’s back.
He did not say anything.
There was nothing to say that was the right size for what had happened.
He simply put his hand on Lucas’s back and kept it there.
The authorities were everywhere now.
American and Mexican both.
Franklin had been on the phone from the moment Nadia had called him from the car, and the machine that had been moving slowly was now moving with everything it had at the speed of a situation that had become something that could not be managed slowly anymore.
The men from the crossing were in custody within the hour.
Robert Harmon’s man was found at the official border crossing three miles east, trying to cross back into the United States with a calm he did not entirely manage to sustain when the border agent asked him to step aside.
He was not a man who broke easily.
He broke within the day.
Not because the questioning was exceptional.
Because he had crossed the line and he knew it, and the line, once crossed, had a weight that men like him were not accustomed to carrying because men like him had always managed to stay on the right side of it.
He said everything.
He had been professional his whole career.
Professionalism had a limit, and he had found it.
He said everything from the beginning.
Who had given the instruction?
What the instruction had been.
How the network worked.
Who had been at the original crossing in Mexico?
What is the connection to the Harmon family?
How long had it been going on?
He said all of it.
Not out of remorse.
Out of the simple arithmetic of a man who understood that the line between what he had done before and what had happened at the border was the line between what could be managed and what could not, and that his only remaining variable was the distance between himself and the people who had instructed him.
He put that distance in writing.
Every word of it.
Robert Harmon was eighty-three years old.
He was living in a house in California in the particular condition of a man who had maintained his position through decades of careful management and was now facing the arithmetic of age and the much more specific arithmetic of a formal inquiry that had just become a criminal investigation with documented connections to two deaths at the Mexican border.
He was not a man who had ever been genuinely afraid.
He had been cautious.
He had been strategic.
He had been patient in ways that most people did not understand patience to be possible.
But he had not been afraid because the thing that produces genuine fear is not the presence of danger but the presence of consequences that cannot be managed.
He had always managed consequences.
He sat in his California house on the morning of the day the investigators came, and he understood, for the first time in eighty-three years, that consequences had arrived that he could not manage.
He was arrested at nine in the morning by two investigators from Montana and one from California, and a federal officer whose presence indicated the level at which the case had now been classified.
He walked out of his house in handcuffs.
He walked slowly.
He looked straight ahead.
He did not look at his house.
He did not look at the garden.
He did not look at anything that was behind him.
He was the kind of man who only looked forward.
He had always only looked forward.
What was forward now was the inside of a vehicle and a series of proceedings that were going to take the rest of whatever he had left.
Claire Harmon was not at the house when her father was arrested.
She was in Montana.
She had driven to Montana the day after the news from the border because the news from the border had done the thing to her that she had been afraid for twenty years it would do.
It had made the thing she had been living with impossible to continue living with.
She had driven to Montana, she had gone to the office of the sheriff, she had sat down, and she had said that she had something to say and that she had needed to say it for twenty years.
She said it.
All of it.
She said what she had seen in the field outside of town when she was twenty years old.
She said what her father had done and what she had done and what she had known and what she had carried.
She said that she had told herself for twenty years that saying nothing was protecting herself and that now two people were dead at the Mexican border, and she was not going to protect herself anymore.
She wept while she said it.
Not for herself.
For James and Sarah, who had died in a field in October.
For Lucas and Nadia, who had died at a border in May.
For a woman named Elizabeth who had told a young man she did not love him and had not understood what she was setting in motion.
For her mother, Catherine, who had spent a quiet life married to a man whose quietness contained something her mother had known was there and had never had the language or the courage to address.
For herself, at twenty years old, standing in a field with her hands over her mouth, watching something she had set in motion and could not stop.
She wept.
The sheriff waited.
When she was finished, he said he was glad she had come.
He said better late than never was a phrase that did not always apply.
He said in this case, he thought it applied.
He said her testimony, combined with everything else that had come forward, was going to be enough.
He said it was more than enough.
He said it was going to be, finally, conclusive.
He said the families were going to have an answer.
Not the answer they wanted.
Because the answer they wanted was not available.
The answer they wanted was the one where Lucas and Nadia came home.
But the other answer.
The one about what had happened twenty years ago and what had been done to both families, and why and by whom.
That answer was now complete.
He said go home.
He said rest.
He said the law would handle what the law could handle.
He said the rest was for the families.
The rest was for the families.
Both of them.
The Hargroves and the Vosses.
Together.
In the same room for the first time in twenty years, gathered in a way that was the worst possible reason and the most necessary possible occasion.
They gathered first in California for Lucas.
Then, in Montana, for Nadia.
At both gatherings, the two families were together.
Not opposite each other.
Together.
The way they had been for three generations before October in a field destroyed them.
Daniel Hargrove stood at Lucas’s California service and spoke about a young man he had known for less than a year and loved for the full length of that year because some people made the length of the knowing irrelevant.
He said Lucas Voss had walked into his granddaughter’s life in an Arizona classroom and had looked at her the way a man looked at something he recognised before he understood why.
He said he had watched them from a careful distance for several months.
He said he had been trying to protect his granddaughter from a history she did not know and a wound he had been carrying for twenty years.
He said he had not understood, until he had spoken with William Voss in a Tucson restaurant on a Thursday evening, that the wound was not what he thought it was.
He said he had not understood, until a 22-year-old boy from California had put his grandfather on a screen and said this is the story, that the wound was the result of something that had been done to both their families rather than by one to the other.
He said he had not understood until Lucas that understanding was possible.
He said that was not a small thing to give a man.
He said the understanding came too late to prevent what happened.
He said he was going to live with that.
He said they were all going to live with that.
He said, but the understanding was permanent.
He said you could not un-know a thing once you knew it.
He said the wound between the families was not the wound they had believed it to be.
He said that meant the thing that was possible between the families was not the thing they had believed, either.
He said Lucas had shown them that.
He said it had cost him everything.
He said he did not know how to hold the cost and the gift in the same hand.
He said he supposed that was the work of whatever time was left.
He sat down.
William Voss stood up.
He was seventy-nine years old, he moved carefully, he stood at the front of the room where his grandson’s photograph was, he looked at the faces of two families in the same room, and he said one thing.
He said Samuel Voss and Edward Hargrove built something on a cold Montana morning that lasted for three generations.
He said Robert Harmon had tried to destroy it.
He said Robert Harmon was facing the consequences of what he had done.
He said the something that had been built was not destroyed.
He said it was standing in this room right now.
He said that these two families were standing together in the same room.
He said that the child was coming.
He stopped.
He said yes.
He said there was a child coming.
He said Nadia had been eleven weeks pregnant when she died.
He said the child did not survive.
He said that loss was the one he could not speak about because it was too large for words and too recent for distance.
He said, but the fact of it mattered.
He said the fact of it was evidence of something.
He said it was evidence that what Lucas and Nadia had found in an Arizona classroom was real in every sense that real could mean.
He said it was evidence that the two families were connected in a way that went forward as well as back.
He said that the child was gone, but the connection was not.
He said the connection was these two families in this room.
He said he wanted both families to understand something.
He said Edward Hargrove had saved his grandfather, Samuel, when no one else would.
He said Samuel Voss had rebuilt that debt into something that lasted three generations.
He said Robert Harmon had taken two lives to break it twenty years ago.
He said Robert Harmon had taken three more lives to break it now.
He said it was not broken.
He said some things were built to last, and this was one of them.
He said Edward and Samuel had built it.
He said their children had continued it.
He said their grandchildren had found it again without being told where to look.
He said that was not an accident.
He said that was not a coincidence.
He said that was the nature of something true.
He said true things found each other.
He said you could separate them and lie about them and put twenty years and two thousand miles between them, but you could not make them not true.
He said Lucas and Nadia were true.
He said they had found each other across everything that had been arranged to keep them apart.
He said he did not know what to call that.
He said he only knew it could not be taken from either family.
He sat down.
The room was very quiet.
Both families.
Together.
In the quiet.
The legal proceedings took two years.
Robert Harmon died in custody after eighteen months.
He died with the case unresolved by the standards of the courtroom.
He did not die with it unresolved by any other standard.
His man cooperated fully.
The network was documented.
The shell companies were traced.
The connections to the events of twenty years ago and the events at the border were established.
Claire’s testimony stood.
The man from the Crawford ranch gave his deposition from his hospital bed three weeks before he died, and the deposition was recorded and witnessed and was, in the words of the prosecutor, the kind of testimony that juries believed because only a man who had been carrying something for twenty years could produce it.
The daughter was charged.
The charge was an accessory before the fact to the original incident twenty years ago.
She pleaded guilty.
She was given a sentence that took her age, her circumstances, and her cooperation into account.
Whether the sentence was just was a question that different people answered differently.
Whether justice was available for what had been taken was a question that had only one answer.
It was not.
Justice was available for what could be quantified, charged, and proven.
The rest was not available from any court.
The rest was what the families carried.
Daniel Hargrove went back to Montana after the California service.
He drove north through California and Nevada and into Idaho and then into Montana on a road he had driven before and recognised in the specific way of a road that had always been going somewhere and finally was.
He drove to the north valley.
He drove to the fence line.
The fence line between the property that had been the Hargroves’ and the property that had been the Vosses’ and had become the Harmons’ and was now in legal uncertainty as the estate of a man who had died in custody faced the consequences of the investigation’s findings.
He stood at the fence line.
He did not look south.
He looked north.
He looked at the Montana mountains.
He looked at the sky above them.
The sky was the Montana sky in late summer.
Lower and softer than the Arizona sky.
The stars are closer.
He stood at the fence line for a long time.
He thought about his father and what his father had told him once about Edward Hargrove and Samuel Voss and the cold morning and the broken fence posts.
He thought about what that morning had produced.
He thought about everything it had produced.
He thought about a grey dupatta and a white kameez and a coffee place with tea that was genuinely not good and two people on a porch in Mexico watching the hills go dark.
He thought about Lucas Voss on his hands and knees on the Mexican ground, saying a name that did not answer anymore.
He thought about the child.
He thought about the three lives taken at the border.
He thought about the two lives taken in a field twenty years ago.
He thought about what five lives cost.
He thought about what five lives meant.
He thought about William Voss saying true things found each other.
He thought about the fact that they had found each other.
That across everything arranged to keep them apart, they had found each other.
He thought about that for a long time.
Then he went home.
He sat in the kitchen.
He poured two cups of tea.
He left one on the table.
He drank the other.
He sat in his kitchen with the second cup of tea on the table and the Montana night outside, and everything that was going to have to be lived with surrounding him.
He sat.
He breathed.
He was still there in the morning.
William Voss flew back to California.
He sat in the house he had built and looked at the photograph of himself and Daniel Hargrove as young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing into a camera in a time when everything was still possible.
He had moved it from Lucas’s desk.
He had not been able to leave it there.
He sat with the photograph and the California light coming in through the window and the particular quality of a house that had someone missing from it.
He thought about Lucas.
He thought about Nadia.
He thought about the child.
He thought about what he was going to do with whatever time was left.
He thought about the fence line in Montana and the two families standing together in rooms in California and Montana, saying goodbye to two people who had brought them back together by the simple, impossible fact of finding each other.
He thought about what Samuel Voss would have said.
He thought Samuel would have said that the question was not what had been lost.
The question was what to do with what remained.
He sat with that for a long time.
Then he picked up the phone.
He called Daniel Hargrove.
Daniel answered on the second ring.
He said William.
William said to Daniel.
He said I want to come to Montana.
He said not for the proceedings or the legal matters or any of the things Franklin was managing.
He said I want to come to the valley.
He said I want to see the fence line.
He said I want to see where Edward and Samuel fixed the fence.
He said I think I need to see it.
Daniel was quiet for a moment.
Then he said he thought that was right.
He said he thought that was exactly right.
He said the fence line was still there.
He said it had always been there.
He said come when you are ready.
William said he was ready now.
He said he would come next week.
Daniel said he would be at the fence line when he arrived.
He said they could stand there together.
He said he thought Edward and Samuel would not have minded that.
William said no.
He said he thought Edward and Samuel would have expected nothing less.
He looked at the photograph.
The two young men.
His father and Daniel’s father.
Arms around each other’s shoulders.
Laughing.
In a time when everything was still possible.
He thought about what they had made.
He thought about what it had survived.
He thought about the thing that Robert Harmon had spent a lifetime trying to destroy and had only succeeded in making more visible.
He thought about Lucas finding Nadia in an Arizona classroom across everything arranged to keep them apart.
He thought about what that meant.
He did not have words for it yet.
He thought he might find the words at the fence line.
He thought that was possibly where the words had always been.
He went to Montana in September.
The valley in September was the valley at its most itself.
The mountains were beginning to show the first pale reaches of the year’s first snow on their peaks.
The grass was long and gold, the way Montana grass went gold at the end of summer.
The sky was exactly the sky.
Lower and softer than other skies.
The stars are closer.
He drove from the airport in a rental car through the north valley on roads he had not driven in twenty years.
The roads were the same.
Roads did not change the way people changed.
Roads simply became slightly more themselves with the years.
He drove to the fence line.
Daniel was there.
He was standing at the fence line, the way William had seen him in his mind a thousand times over twenty years, looking at the mountains, his back to the road, the particular posture of a man who had been standing in this place his whole life.
William got out of the car.
He walked to the fence line.
He stood beside Daniel.
They looked at the mountains.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
Then Daniel said the fence line had been repaired six times since his father’s time.
He said the posts had been replaced.
He said the wire was not the original wire.
He said, but the line was the same.
He said it was in the same place it had always been.
William said that some things did not move.
Daniel said no.
He said they did not.
They stood at the fence line in Montana in September, and the mountains were ahead of them. The valley was around them, behind them both was the place where two families had been divided, and ahead of them was whatever came next.
William said he had been thinking about what to do with the property.
He said the Harmon property was now in legal uncertainty.
He said once the estate was resolved, there would be decisions to make.
He said he did not have a specific proposal.
He said he had an instinct.
Daniel said what instinct?
William said the instinct was that the land should not stay in the hands of a family that had used it the way the Harmon family had used it.
He said the instinct that the valley deserved better.
He said the instinct that two families who had built something on this land once and had something of it taken and had survived and found each other again might have a claim on what that land became.
Daniel was quiet.
Then he said a foundation.
William said what?
Daniel said a foundation.
He said for agricultural education.
He said that for young people who came from the land and wanted to understand it.
He said that Lucas and Nadia had both been studying agricultural economics.
He said they had both gone to university because they believed that understanding the land better was worth the years it took.
He said he thought a foundation in their names that did the same for others was exactly the kind of thing that was worth doing with land that had been held by people who used it badly.
William was quiet for a long time.
He looked at the mountains.
He thought about Lucas in an Arizona classroom, not taking notes because he remembered things without writing them down.
He thought about Nadia leaning over and asking what the lecturer said.
He thought about two people who had found each other through the agricultural economics of all the unlikely routes through the world.
He said yes.
He said that was exactly right.
He said that was what the land should become.
He said in their names.
Daniel said in their names.
They stood at the fence line.
The Montana September moved around them.
The mountains stood where they had always stood.
The valley lay below them as it had always lain.
And two old men who had been separated by a lie for twenty years and brought back together by the grandchildren they had lost stood at the fence line where everything had begun a hundred years ago and felt, without quite being able to say it, that the thing built on this ground was not over.
That it was not finished.
That the fence line was not an ending.
That it had never been an ending.
That Edward Hargrove and Samuel Voss had built something here that was bigger than either of them and had survived more than either of them could have asked of it and was standing at this fence line still, in these two old men and in the foundation that would carry the names of two young people who had proved, one final time, that true things found each other.
Across everything.
Always.
William put his hand on the top fence post.
He held it there for a moment.
He thought about Edward Hargrove riding into a fence line on a cold morning.
He thought about Samuel Voss coming out of his farmhouse and looking at the broken posts and the man on the horse.
He thought about two men picking up the first post together.
He thought about what that had made.
He said quietly, to the fence post, to the mountains, to the Montana morning, to no one in particular, and perhaps to everyone, he said that it was still standing.
He said all of it.
It was still standing.
Daniel looked at him.
Then Daniel looked at the mountains.
Then he put his hand on the fence post beside William’s.
They stood there.
Two old men.
Two families.
At the fence line where it all began.
As the Montana morning came fully in around them.
As the mountains stood.
As the valley breathed.
As the sky, lower and softer than other skies, with the stars closer than they were anywhere else in the world, held everything underneath it in the particular permanent way of skies that had been doing this for a very long time and were not planning to stop.
It was still standing.
All of it.
Still standing.
THE END
For the ones who find each other across everything arranged to keep them apart.
And for the ones who build things that last.
It all starts here, Chapter 1: DUST AND DYNASTY | THE ROOTS OF A BROKEN TREE
Author’s Note
This story is dedicated to the endurance of what is real.
Five lives appear in this story that should not have been taken.
Two were taken in a field in October twenty years ago.
Three taken at a border in May.
The story does not resolve their loss.
Loss of that kind does not resolve.
It is carried.
What can be resolved is what is done with what remains.
The Hargrove-Voss Foundation for Agricultural Education is a fictional institution.
The fence line is real in the way that all true things are real.
It is still standing.