Nantaje sent a man to the ranch 2 weeks later, not as a messenger, but as a matter of respect. The man's name was Chino, one of Nantaje's sons-in-law, quiet and measured. He sat at Wesley's table and spoke to Sonsee in Chiricahua for a long time. What he'd come to say was this: Duclura had lost standing in the camp. It had been the last in a long list of things, and the list had finally grown too long even for those who'd wanted to look away.
The elders had made their judgement. Whatever hold Duclura had used against Sonsee was gone. Chino said something else that Wesley only understood from how Sonsee sat very still hearing it. He asked her later what it had been. She took her time finding the words.
Then she said that it would not be unwelcome if she came home sometimes. But the camp's door was not closed. He asked her what she wanted to do. She looked out the east window. The morning sun was coming through it, laying a strip of light across the floor.
She said she didn't know yet. She said she had been so long without a choice that she had forgotten what it felt like to have one. He nodded. He understood that well enough. Spring came fast and dry and then suddenly green along the draws.
Sun Say had planted a small garden at the south side of the house. She'd ridden in herself to the general store on the sorrel mare Wesley had given her use of. Come back with seeds and a clay pot and nothing else. She didn't explain and he didn't ask. One evening near the end of March, they were both at the table.
She was working on a piece of beadwork that had been going slowly all winter. A geometric pattern in red and white and blue on deerskin. He was reading a letter from his sister in Tucson that had nothing much in it and had been sitting unread on the shelf for a week. The fire in the stove had burned to coals and the room was warm and the darkness outside the window had the soft quality that comes before the first real warmth of the year. She said, without looking up from the beadwork, "Wesley. " He looked up.