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Under a dry, pitiless sun, Finn returns to Red Bend for his brother's burial and discovers the communal spring walled off by a powerful landowner. As law drags its slow steps and men with money press, Finn must choose between leaving his vow of violence behind or using force to hold a town together—an urgent, dust‑thick reckoning at the water’s edge.
Finn came into Red Bend under a sun that held its breath. The valley lay like a broken bowl, its rim of hard hills rimmed in brown, the grass clumped and brittle, the streambed a ribbon of pale stone where water used to braid itself in silver. He could read the place by the fences and the angle of roofs the way an old reader reads an old, familiar book. There were new posts down near the spring, squared and taut, with fresh nails and a line of rockwork someone had put up as if to say this was not for the town to touch anymore. A low scarecrow of a gate, a neat sign of iron, and two men in better shirts than the valley had seen before from these parts walking the line with the authority of coin behind them. He felt the change like a bruise.
His brother's coffin rode in a cart behind him, covered by a blanket that smelled faintly of the cellar where they'd kept things cool as boys. Tommy sat beside the box, shoulders too straight for a boy of twelve, fists knuckled on the wooden rim. He stared at the dry channel where the spring used to gather the children at dusk. When Tommy spoke it was only to name some small thing—an insect, an old whistle—and the sound of his voice was the first fracture in Finn's quiet. He hadn't expected to see the boy so grown, hadn't expected grief to look like such a small thing held so hard.
The town gathered in the yard by the church made of clapboard and the low schoolhouse with its single slate board. Liza was there, sleeves rolled, hair pinned back to keep the dust from claiming it; Abbey stood with the badge like a dull coin in her hand though her posture had a kind of practiced steadiness that didn't hide the thinness of her force. Finn had not heard her swear before, not out loud, but he had heard the names she called the problem. Gideon Hale. Purchases filed out of sequence. A lawyer in town who smiled like a sundown.
People came forward to stand by the coffin, touching the wood as if to be reassured that the thing within had been real. Finn kept his hands folded so his own fingers did not find the black leather pistol he kept wrapped and hidden beneath his coat. It was a habit of the hand he had tried to break; the gesture belonged to a life he had walked away from with the same stubbornness that had driven him out of town once. He told himself of that choice while the preacher spoke the set words, of how he had given the gun away and set his hand to other trades, but grief is an honest thing and memory has its teeth.