Chapter 2: Arizona
What the Desert Knows Before You Do
The University of Arizona sat in the middle of Tucson like something that had decided to be permanent and had been proving it ever since.
The desert around it was not the empty desert of popular imagination.
It was alive in the particular way of places that required effort to understand, the saguaro standing in the morning light like sentinels that had been there longer than anything else and intended to remain, the mountains ringing the city on all sides turning purple and gold with the hours, the air carrying the specific dry warmth of a place that had made its peace with the sun a very long time ago and found the arrangement agreeable.
Lucas Voss arrived in August and found his dormitory room and unpacked his car with the efficiency of someone who had been taking care of himself long enough that the mechanics of a new place held no particular anxiety.
He had always been good at arriving somewhere.
His grandfather William had been the same.
A man who could walk into an unfamiliar room and locate himself within it quickly, not through confidence exactly but through the particular quality of attention that came from being raised to pay attention.
He unpacked his books first.
Then his clothes.
Then the photograph he always packed last and unpacked first, which was the photograph of his grandfather as a young man standing in front of the Montana property with a man Lucas did not know, both of them laughing, the mountains in the background small and distant and perfectly themselves.
He put the photograph on the desk.
He looked at it for a moment.
He had asked his grandfather about the other man in the photograph once, when he was twelve.
His grandfather had looked at the photograph for a long time without speaking.
Then he had said that was a man he had known a long time ago.
Lucas had asked for his name.
His grandfather had said his name was Daniel.
Lucas had asked what happened to him.
His grandfather had looked at the photograph for a moment longer, and then he had put it face down on the table and said some things were better left where they were.
Lucas had not asked again.
He looked at the photograph on his desk in his Arizona dormitory room.
Then he went to find the dining hall because he had driven eight hours, he was hungry, and the past was a country he had no map for yet.
Nadia Hargrove arrived two days later on a flight from Billings that connected through Phoenix and deposited her in Tucson in the early evening when the desert light was doing the thing it did at that hour, turning everything amber and long-shadowed and more beautiful than strictly necessary.
She stood outside the terminal with her bags and looked at the mountains and felt the particular feeling of someone who had left a place they loved and arrived somewhere that was going to require a different kind of love.
Not better.
Just different.
Montana was mountains and cold mornings and land that had her family’s hands in it going back as far as she knew.
Arizona was something else.
Arizona was a beginning.
She liked beginnings.
She had always been better at starting things than at staying still, which was a quality her mother described as restlessness and her grandmother had described as the Hargrove way, and which Nadia herself described simply as forward, which was the direction she had always found most interesting.
She took a cab to the university.
She unpacked with less efficiency than Lucas and more colour, the walls of the dormitory room acquiring personality within an hour of her arrival in the way of people who understood instinctively that a space was only as alive as you were willing to make it.
She put photographs on the desk.
Her mother.
Her grandmother.
Her grandfather, Daniel at the fence line of the property looking south with the expression he always had when he looked south, the expression that contained something she had never been able to name, something that lived just behind his eyes in the place where the things he did not speak of resided.
She looked at his photograph for a moment.
Then she went to unpack her books and did not think about the expression again until much later, when thinking about it became important in ways she could not yet imagine.
Agricultural economics met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at eight in a classroom that received the full force of the Arizona sunrise through its east-facing windows, which meant that every Tuesday and Thursday, the first twenty minutes of class were conducted in a light so specific and so warm that it was either inspirational or blinding depending on where you sat.
Lucas sat on the left side of the room, away from the windows.
Not because he had planned to.
Because the left side of the room was where he had arrived, and sitting down was the logical conclusion of arriving.
The classroom filled around him.
He had his notebook open and his pen uncapped, and he was reading the course outline with the focused attention he brought to everything he was doing for the first time.
He was not paying attention to who else came in.
He was paying attention to the outline.
The chair beside him was empty when the lecturer began.
It was occupied four minutes after the lecturer began, quietly, without apology or announcement, by someone who had found the east-side seats intolerable and crossed the room to the left with the decisiveness of a person who identified a problem and resolved it without ceremony.
He noticed her in the way he noticed things.
Briefly and completely, and then returned his attention to where it had been.
She opened her notebook.
She uncapped her pen.
She began writing with the focused attention of someone who intended to be in this room and intended to use the time.
Twelve minutes into the lecture, she leaned slightly toward him.
She said, quietly and without looking at him, that the lecturer had said something about soil composition and commodity pricing in the first ten minutes that was going to be on the exam, and asked if he had written it down.
He said he had not written it down.
She said that was unfortunate.
He said he remembered it.
She looked at him for the first time.
He looked back.
Something passed between them in the way things passed between people when they were meeting someone they were going to know.
Not electricity or recognition or any of the dramatic vocabulary of fiction.
Just a small shift in the quality of the air between two people.
The kind that happened before the brain had time to comment on it.
She said what did he remember.
He said that commodity pricing in agricultural markets followed emotional cycles more than rational ones, that farmers made decisions based on inherited practice rather than current data, and that understanding the emotional architecture of agricultural decision-making was worth more than any formula on any board.
She looked at him.
She looked at her notebook.
She wrote it down.
She said her name was Nadia.
He said his name was Lucas.
They looked at the front of the room.
The lecture continued.
Neither of them said anything else.
But for the rest of the class, something had changed in the quality of the space between them, the way a room changed after someone opened a window, not dramatic, not loud, just different in a way that, once noticed, could not be unnoticed.
They did not become friends immediately.
That was not how it happened with Lucas and Nadia.
They became, in the weeks after the first class, simply present to each other.
In the same classroom.
At the same library table, when the library was busy, tables were shared out of necessity rather than choice.
In the same queue at the university coffee cart on Thursday mornings, when the line was long and standing in it was its own small community of the impatient and the tired.
They talked in the way people talked when they were in the same place regularly, and talking was the natural result.
Not deeply at first.
Not with the weight of real conversation.
Just the surface things, the class and the lecturer, the particular difficulty of the reading list, and the specific challenge of studying land management in a desert climate when you had grown up in places where the land management challenge was excess water rather than the absence of it.
She was from Montana.
He discovered this on a Thursday morning in the coffee queue three weeks into the semester when she said something about the temperature, he said it was mild by California standards, she said anything was mild by Montana standards, and he said his family had come from Montana originally.
She looked at him.
Not with recognition.
With the particular attention of someone who had just heard a word in a foreign country that sounded like home.
He said his grandfather had grown up there.
She said her grandfather had grown up there.
He said what part?
She said the north valley.
Something moved through him.
He did not know what it was.
He said his grandfather had been from the north valley, too.
She said that was something.
He said yes.
They got their coffee.
They walked to class.
Neither of them said anything else about Montana.
But the thread was there now.
Thin and unexamined.
Connecting them in a direction neither of them had yet thought to follow.
Friendship, when it came, came the way it always came with the people who were going to matter.
Through the ordinary.
Through a group project in October that paired them together by alphabetical accident and required them to spend three evenings in the library working through a case study on water rights and agricultural pricing that was more complex than either of them had anticipated.
Through those three evenings, they discovered things about each other that the surface conversation had not reached.
Lucas discovered that Nadia worked the way he worked, completely and without the performance of working, her attention on the actual problem rather than on how she appeared to be engaging with it.
Nadia discovered that Lucas was funny in the way she most liked people to be funny, which was accidentally, without trying, the wit arriving in the middle of a serious point and making the point better rather than undercutting it.
They discovered that both of them had grown up on working land and that this made their approach to agricultural economics different from the students who had come to the subject theoretically, more grounded, more impatient with abstraction, more interested in what worked than in what was elegant.
They discovered that both of them had a grandfather they loved with a specificity and depth that was not the ordinary love of grandchildren for grandparents but something more deliberate, the love of a young person who had recognised in an older one a quality worth learning from and had set about learning it.
And they discovered, without saying it directly because neither of them was the kind of person who said the important things directly until they had been thinking about them long enough to be certain, that the three evenings in the library were something they were not in a hurry to finish.
The project was due on a Friday.
They submitted it on Thursday evening.
They sat in the library for another hour after submitting it.
Not working.
Just there.
Talking about something that had nothing to do with water rights.
When the library announced closing time at ten, they walked out together into the Arizona night, which was warm and full of stars and entirely indifferent to the fact that two people had just quietly crossed a line from acquaintances to something else without stopping to mark the crossing.
Nadia looked up at the stars.
She said that the stars in Arizona were not the same as in Montana.
Lucas said how they were different.
She said in Montana, the sky was closer. The stars felt like they were just above you. In Arizona, they were further away, higher, like the sky had more room.
He looked up.
He said he understood what she meant.
She said where he had grown up.
He said California, but his grandfather’s stories had always been about Montana, so he had always felt partly from somewhere he had never been.
She said she knew that feeling.
He said what feeling?
She said being partly from a place you have never been.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
The Arizona night was warm around them, and the stars were where she had said they were, higher and more distant and somehow more permanent for it.
He said he should walk her back to the residential block because it was late.
She said she knew the way.
He said he knew she knew the way.
She understood.
She did not argue.
They walked back through the warm Arizona night side by side, the conversation continued, and they were at her door before either of them had registered the distance.
She said goodnight.
He said goodnight.
She went inside.
He walked back to his own building through the warm dark and looked at the stars and felt something he had no word for yet because he had not needed the word before and had therefore never gone looking for it.
He went inside.
He sat on his bed and looked at the photograph of his grandfather, the man named Daniel, and thought, for the first time in a long time, about the north valley and what his grandfather had left there.
He did not know why he was thinking about it.
He went to sleep.
He dreamed about Montana, which he had never been to, and it looked in the dream exactly the way his grandfather had described it, which was to say that it looked like the place you were always slightly moving toward even when you thought you were moving somewhere else.
October became November.
November had the particular quality in Arizona of a season that did not arrive dramatically but simply made the warmth more bearable and the nights more worth being outside in.
Lucas and Nadia had dinner together on Thursdays after class.
Not by agreement.
By accumulation.
On the first Thursday, they had both been hungry after a long day, and the dining hall was on the way back from the classroom, so going separately would have required a decision to go separately, which neither of them made.
On the second Thursday, the same thing happened.
By the third Thursday, it was simply Thursday, Thursday meant dinner, and dinner meant the corner table by the window where the air conditioning was least aggressive, and the light was good.
They talked about everything and nothing with the easy-ranging conversation of people who had discovered that the other’s mind was a place worth exploring and that the exploring was more interesting than arriving at any particular destination.
He told her about California and what it was like to grow up knowing your family was from somewhere else.
She told him about Montana and what it was to grow up knowing your family had been somewhere longer than memory could reach.
He told her about his grandfather William, who had built something in California from nothing and who carried a specific gravity in his eyes that Lucas had grown up understanding was not just age.
She told him about her grandfather Daniel, who sat at the fence line of the property and looked south, and carried the same thing.
They were looking at each other across the corner table by the window.
She said her grandfather never explained the south.
He said his grandfather never explained the east.
She said east of California was Montana.
He said south of Montana was the valley.
The table between them was small.
The dining hall was its usual Thursday self, busy and warm and full of the noise of other people’s conversations.
Neither of them said the thing that was sitting between them on the table with the food.
But they both felt it.
The particular weight of two separate silences arriving at the same place from opposite directions.
He said he thought their families might have known each other.
She said she had been thinking the same thing since the coffee queue.
He said why had she not said anything.
She said that saying it out loud made it something that required an answer, and she did not have an answer yet.
He said he did not either.
She said so then.
He said so then.
They ate dinner.
They talked about the next assignment.
They did not talk about Montana or California or two old men who looked in the same direction for reasons neither of them could explain.
But the thread between them was heavier now.
Not a problem.
Just a weight.
The weight of something that was going to need looking at eventually.
They were not ready yet.
And the something understood this.
It waited.
December arrived, and with it the end of semester and the particular energy of a campus preparing to empty, the dining halls and common rooms filling with the noise of people who were finishing things and the quiet of people who were not sure what finishing meant for them yet.
Lucas was going back to California for the holidays.
Nadia was going back to Montana.
They had two weeks left of the semester, and neither of them had said what the summer had made clear and the autumn had confirmed and the evenings in the library and the Thursday dinners and the walks back through the Arizona night had built into something that was now too present to ignore and too important to name carelessly.
On the last Thursday of the semester, Nadia arrived at the corner table with an expression he had learned to read as the expression she had when she was going to say something she had been preparing to say.
He put down his fork.
He gave her his full attention the way he gave everything his full attention.
She said she had been thinking about what happened after the break.
He said what about it?
She said that when they came back in January, things were going to be what they were, and she thought it was worth knowing before they went home what they were.
He was quiet for a moment.
He said he thought she knew what they were.
She said she thought so too.
He said then.
She said she wanted to hear him say it.
He looked at the table.
Then he looked at her.
He said that he had been, since the first Thursday in the coffee queue when she had said she was from Montana and something in him had gone still, trying to find a reason to look at this as anything other than what it was.
She said what it was.
He said that she was the most interesting person he had sat next to since he could remember and that the Thursday dinners were the part of the week he moved toward the way a compass moved toward north.
That was the reason he remembered things from lectures that he had not written down: he had been paying attention, and the reason he had been paying attention was that he knew she would ask, and being asked by her was something he had started to value more than he had told himself was sensible.
She said that was not quite saying it.
He said no.
He said he was in love with her.
He said it the way he said true things.
Plainly.
Without decoration.
The way his grandfather had taught him to say true things.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she said she had known since October.
He said that since October, she had said nothing.
She said she was waiting to see how long it took him to arrive at it.
He shook his head the way people shook their heads when they were not disagreeing.
She reached across the table.
She put her hand over his.
Just that.
Just the warmth of it.
He turned his hand over and let their fingers rest together.
The dining hall continued around them, entirely indifferent.
The Arizona December continued outside the window.
And two families that had not spoken in twenty years, that had been separated by a lie so carefully constructed that it had held for two decades, that had looked south and east from the wrong sides of a distance neither of them understood, were connected again in the simplest possible way.
By two people who did not know the history.
Who had found each other through a Tuesday morning classroom, a coffee queue, and a corner table, and three evenings in a library over water rights.
Who had arrived at love without a map because no one had thought to give them one.
Who would not understand, for some time yet, that the love they had found was the thing that had been meant to happen for three generations and had been prevented once and was now, despite everything, happening again.
They flew home for the holidays.
Lucas to California.
Nadia to Montana.
They texted through the break with the frequency of people who had decided the distance was a temporary condition and were managing it accordingly.
Nadia’s grandfather, Daniel, saw her on her phone more than usual over the holidays.
He did not comment.
He watched.
He had the eyes of a man who had been watching things for a long time and had learned that watching was sometimes the most important thing you could do.
On the last evening of the holiday, he asked her who she was texting.
She said a friend from university.
He said what friend.
She said his name was Lucas.
She said his family was also from Montana originally.
She said his grandfather’s name was William.
Daniel Hargrove put down the cup he was holding.
He put it down carefully.
The way a person put something down when they needed their hands free to manage what was happening in their chest.
Nadia looked at him.
She said grandfather.
He said nothing for a moment.
He looked at the table.
Then he looked at her.
His eyes were doing the thing they did when the south came into them.
But it was not south this time.
It was not the direction of anything.
It was just the eyes of an old man who had heard a name he had not heard in twenty years and had not realised until it arrived how much of him had been waiting to hear it.
He said what did Lucas’s grandfather look like.
She said she had not met his grandfather.
She said, but she had seen a photograph that Lucas kept on his desk.
She said two young men, Montana mountains in the background, laughing.
Daniel Hargrove closed his eyes.
He sat very still.
He said there was a fence line in the photograph.
She said she did not remember a fence line.
He said it did not matter.
He opened his eyes.
He looked at his granddaughter with an expression she had never seen on his face before.
Not the southern expression.
Not the carried weight.
Something more complex and more fragile than both of those things.
Something that was trying to be something, but was not yet certain what.
He said to her, quietly, to be careful.
She said careful how.
He said just careful.
She said to her grandfather what is going on.
He looked at the table.
He said some things needed thinking about before they were spoken.
He said he would tell her.
Not tonight.
But he would tell her.
She looked at him.
She said alright.
She went to bed.
Daniel Hargrove sat at the kitchen table for a long time.
He thought about a fence line.
He thought about a cold morning.
He thought about his father telling him the story of Edward and Samuel the way his father had told all the important stories, once, completely, so that it was in him and did not need repeating.
He thought about James and Sarah.
He thought about William Voss leaving in December with his family in a truck and not looking back, and Daniel standing at the fence line watching him go and not calling out.
He thought about twenty years of not calling out.
He thought about a young woman on her phone in Montana, texting a young man in California whose grandfather was William Voss.
He thought about what the world was doing.
Whether it was closing something or opening it.
Whether those were the same thing.
He sat until the kitchen light was the only light in the house, then turned it off. He went to his room, lay in the dark, and thought about fences.
About how long they lasted.
About what they were for.
About the difference between a fence that keeps things out and a fence that keeps things in.
About a morning in Montana a hundred years ago, when two men had fixed a fence together and started something that was apparently not finished yet.
He did not sleep much.
But what sleep he had was the sleep of someone who had been carrying something for a very long time and had just, without warning and without preparation, set it down.
January came.
Lucas and Nadia returned to Arizona.
The campus came back to life the way campuses came back to life in January, slightly dazed, slightly determined, the year ahead still new enough to feel possible.
They met on the first Monday back in the corridor outside the agricultural economics department.
Not by plan.
By the natural gravity of two people who had spent a month apart and were now in the same building.
She saw him before he saw her.
She watched him for a moment in the corridor with his jacket and his bag and the expression he had when he was thinking about something, and the something was not resolved yet.
Then he looked up.
He saw her.
The expression changed.
Not dramatically.
Just the particular change that happened in a face when it found something it had been, without fully admitting it, looking for.
He walked to her.
She did not move toward him.
She let him come.
He stopped in front of her.
He said hello.
She said hello.
He said how Montana was.
She said cold and full of things she needed to tell him.
He said what things?
She said not here.
She said later.
He said alright.
They went to class.
Later that evening, on the roof terrace of the social sciences building, where students went to be above things and think about them from a height.
The January in Arizona was mild enough that the terrace was comfortable with a jacket.
The city spread below them, the mountains ringed it, and the stars were where Nadia had said they were, higher and more permanent than Montana stars.
She told him what her grandfather had said.
Not all of it.
What she had.
Which was that her grandfather knew the name William Voss and that it had done something to him when she said it, that he had told her to be careful, and then said he would tell her something he had not told her yet.
Lucas was quiet for a long time.
He said his grandfather had also said something.
Not on the phone.
In August.
Before Lucas had left for Arizona.
He said his grandfather had told him that if anyone gave him cause to doubt them, to trust the doubt.
He said he had not understood what his grandfather meant then.
He said he thought he might be beginning to understand now.
Nadia said what did he think it meant.
He said he thought it meant their families had history.
She said good history or bad history.
He said he did not know.
He said he thought probably both.
She said did it change anything.
He looked at her.
She was looking at the city below with the expression she had when she was thinking about something important and was approaching it carefully.
He said no.
She looked at him.
He said whatever happened was not between them.
She said they did not know what happened.
He said no.
He said, but whatever it was, it was behind them.
And they were here.
And here was the only place he knew how to be.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she said alright.
She put her head against his shoulder.
He let her.
They sat on the terrace while the Arizona night moved around them and the city glittered below and the mountains stood in the dark where they always stood and somewhere in Montana and California two old men were sitting with things they had been carrying for twenty years and feeling, without knowing why, that the carrying was about to become something else.
The second semester moved with the particular momentum of two people who had stopped being careful about what they were to each other and had started being simply that thing, openly and without the management that carefulness required.
They studied together.
They ate together.
They walked through the campus in the evenings, and the conversation was the conversation of people who had run out of surface things to say and had gone deeper and found that the deeper was more interesting and were now simply living there.
Other students knew they were together before either of them announced it because the way they moved through the world together was a kind of announcement that required no words.
Their professors knew them as the two students from agricultural families who asked the questions that were not on the syllabus, the questions behind the questions, the ones that were about what the land meant rather than what it yielded.
The university knew them as Lucas and Nadia, the quiet couple in the corner of the agricultural economics department who seemed to understand something about what they were doing that not everyone in the building had accessed yet.
They were happy.
It was the simple, specific happiness of two people who had found the right person at the right time in the right place and had enough sense to know it and enough courage to stay in it.
They called their grandparents.
Nadia called Daniel every Sunday.
He always asked about her studies first.
Then, carefully, he asked about Lucas.
Not intrusively.
In the way of an old man who was monitoring something from a distance and had decided that monitoring was what was available to him, and was making the most of it.
Lucas called William every Sunday.
William asked about the studies, the land, the program, and the things that led up to asking what he actually wanted to ask.
One Sunday in March, he asked directly.
He said there is a girl.
Lucas said yes.
William said what her name is.
Lucas said Nadia Hargrove.
The phone was quiet for a moment.
Lucas said grandfather.
William said I am here.
He said I am here.
He said that name.
He said it the way people said something they had believed they would never hear again and had not prepared themselves for hearing.
Lucas said what about the name.
William said it was a name he had not heard in twenty years.
Lucas said he thought their families knew each other.
William said yes.
Lucas said what happened.
William was quiet for a long time.
Long enough that Lucas thought the call had dropped.
Then William said that it was a long story.
He said it was a story that needed to be told in person.
He said he was going to come to Arizona.
Lucas said when.
William said soon.
He said before the end of the semester.
He said there were things Lucas needed to know, he should have told them sooner, and the reason he had not was a reason he was no longer sure was good enough.
Lucas said alright.
He said grandfather.
William said yes.
He said I love her.
The phone was quiet again.
Then William Voss said, quietly, in the voice of a man who had been carrying something for twenty years and was in the process of setting it down, that he knew.
He said he had known, he thought, since August.
He said that was why he had told Lucas what he told him in the car.
Lucas said to trust the doubt.
William said yes.
He said nothing about the girl.
Lucas said what then?
William said about the things around the girl.
He said the girl was not in doubt.
He said the things that had kept their families apart were the doubt.
He said there was a difference.
Lucas said he understood.
He did not fully understand yet.
But he would.
April arrived.
The desert was warm now in the way that preceded the summer heat, the warmth still welcome, the air still bearable, the evenings still worth being outside in.
Lucas and Nadia sat on the roof terrace on a Tuesday evening with the city below them, the semester nearly finished, and the summer ahead of them open and unplanned in the way of summers before, you know what they are going to contain.
She said what are you doing this summer.
He said he was going to California first.
His grandfather was coming to Arizona first, he said, before the semester ended.
She said what for?
He said there were things his grandfather wanted to tell him.
She said about their families.
He said he thought so.
She said her grandfather had told her something in February.
He said what?
She said that their families had been close a long time ago.
She said very close, the kind of close that did not have a word for it.
She said something had happened and the families had been separated, and her grandfather had spent twenty years believing something about the Voss family that he was no longer certain was true.
Lucas was very still.
She said she did not know the details yet.
She said her grandfather would tell the full story soon.
She said, but she knew enough to know that whatever had happened had not been what either family believed it to be.
He looked at her.
She said that was all she had.
He said that was quite a lot.
She said yes.
He said does it change anything.
She looked at him the way she looked at things she had already decided.
She said no.
He said alright.
She said alright.
The city below them continued its evening.
The mountains continued their permanence.
And neither of them said what they were both thinking, which was that the summer was going to contain something neither of them had been prepared for, that the things their grandfathers were carrying were about to be set down in front of them, and that the setting down was going to require more of them than either of them yet knew.
But they were there.
Together.
And being there together was the fact that everything else would have to arrange itself around.
That was not a small thing.
That was, in the way of all true things, the whole thing.
William Voss arrived in Tucson on a Thursday in April.
He came alone.
He had not told anyone he was coming except Lucas, and he had asked Lucas not to say anything to Nadia yet.
He was seventy-nine years old, he moved carefully, and he had the eyes he had always had, clear and watching and holding something that had been held a long time and was ready to be put down.
Lucas met him at the airport.
He looked at his grandfather coming through the arrivals gate and felt the particular feeling of someone seeing a person they love in a context that made that love more specific.
William saw Lucas and walked to him, and they embraced the way they always embraced, briefly and completely.
Lucas took his bag.
They walked to the car.
William looked at the Arizona sky.
He said it was warm.
Lucas said it was.
William said the Montana sky was different.
Lucas said he had heard.
William said someday he should go.
Lucas said he thought he would.
They drove to the university.
William sat in the passenger seat and looked at the desert, the saguaro, the mountains, and the city, and said nothing for a long time.
Then he said that he had been trying to find the right way to tell Lucas what he was going to tell him for twenty years.
Lucas said he was ready.
William said he was not sure Lucas could be ready.
He said he was not sure he himself was ready even now.
But he said it was time.
He said some silences were necessary at the beginning.
He said some silences became the wrong thing without you noticing the change.
He said twenty years was too long.
He said he had told himself it was protecting Lucas.
He said he thought that now he had been protecting himself.
He said there was a difference, and he had not been honest about which one it was.
Lucas said grandfather.
William said yes.
Lucas said just tell me.
And William Voss looked at the Arizona desert and told his grandson the story of Edward and Samuel and what they had built and what Robert Harmon had destroyed and what it had cost and what it had taken from both families and what twenty years of silence had done to a wound that had never properly been understood in the first place.
He told it from the beginning.
He left nothing out.
He told it the way a man told a story he had been carrying so long it had become part of him and was going to leave a mark in the shape of itself when it finally came out.
Lucas drove and listened.
He did not interrupt.
He asked no questions.
He let the story come out the way his grandfather had needed to tell it, in order, from the beginning, with all its weight intact.
When William finished, they were parked outside the university in a lot full of other cars and other people’s ordinary days, and the Arizona afternoon was doing what April afternoons in Arizona did, being warm and clear and entirely itself.
Lucas sat for a long time.
Then he said Robert Harmon.
William said yes.
Lucas said the family that came to Montana.
William said yes.
Lucas said the daughter.
William said to Claire.
He said she had married into the Hargrove family.
He said a cousin, a peripheral connection.
He said he had always thought it was to maintain access.
He said he had never been able to prove it.
Lucas sat.
He thought about Nadia’s grandfather.
He thought about Daniel Hargrove looking south at the fence line.
He thought about what William had just told him.
He thought about two families that had believed the wrong thing about each other for twenty years because a man named Robert Harmon had needed them to.
He said we need to talk to her grandfather.
William said yes.
He said that was why he had come.
He said it was time the silence was over.
He said it was time both families knew what had actually happened.
He said it was time, he thought, looking at his grandson in the Arizona afternoon, for more than one kind of beginning.
Lucas looked at him.
William Voss looked back at his grandson with the eyes he had always had.
Clear and watching.
And now, for the first time in twenty years, no longer holding the thing they had been holding.
Empty of it.
Ready.
End of Chapter Two.
Chapter 3 is coming soon.
Subscribe to 786 Web Stories so you do not miss what happens when the truth surfaces, the Harmon family moves to stop it, and everything Lucas and Nadia have built is put in danger of being taken the same way everything before them was taken.