He’d distrusted her for months, but this was something new. The story she’d related and the plainness of the telling, all the facts lining up with terrible precision—she was either being honest and entrusting him with everything, or lying so atrociously he couldn’t bear to think it. She was General Bell’s daughter. She had shot her own brother. He believed it, every word, in spite of every reason not to. The vision of her clinging to the branch wouldn’t leave him so he followed it back, reversing course up the Antler, trying to think of where a creek might have merged with the river. She must have floated for hours, if she had started near Kinship, in water so cold it had weakened him in minutes. But if anything was surer than her talent for disaster, it was her lightning-proof, powder-charged talent for escape. She’d told the story start to finish with enough vivid detail that Tom was left to focus most keenly on the gaps. She had described John Summer and their private conversations but had naturally withheld specifics of their intimacy.
