"It was my dad's," he said. "The shirt. He left it. It doesn't fit me either."
Wade nodded. He looked out across the highway at the long tan swell of the benchland running north toward the Missouri Breaks. He had rehearsed this part on the drive over and the rehearsal had been no good, so he let it go.
"Monday morning," he said. "Eight o'clock. I'll pick you up here. We'll drive to Lewistown together and go to the sheriff's office and you'll tell Tom Danner what you told me. All of it. The man in Roundup, too."
Danny's face went white, but he nodded.
"I'm going to tell him what Claire did, because she won't let me not. And I'm going to tell him what I want, which is for it to go to youth court and not the other way. I'm going to tell him you've worked off every dollar but eleven hundred and forty of what those calves were worth, and you've got a ledger with your signature on every line to prove it, and that I'm satisfied on restitution as soon as that balance is paid. And I'm going to take my name off the reward."
The boy stared at him. "Why?"
Wade thought about it. He thought about his father in 1987 standing in an empty corral, and about Ray Ferris in his truck on the courthouse street, and about a small girl in a flannel shirt down to her knees saying, The one who eats dinner here when you're gone.