If trouble comes here because of you, I will be gone before it comes," Sona said."If you tell me it is coming, I will go." He looked at her then.
Her feet were wrapped in his spare socks. Her hands around the cup were still red and cracked. She had walked 40 miles through a killing blizzard to knock on a stranger's door, state her terms plainly, and offer him something in return for every breath of warmth she needed. He thought about what Sarah had said.
She knocked."You stay," he said."We'll work out the rest." The first 2 days were careful ones.
Eli moved through the house the way a man moves around something he's not sure about yet. He gave her the small room off the kitchen that had been a pantry, then a sewing room, and hadn't been much of anything since Clara died. There was a cot in it, a nail to hang things on, a window that looked out at the snow-buried pasture. Sona did not ask for anything she hadn't been offered, and did not go anywhere she hadn't been invited.
She kept to the kitchen and the main room. She helped without being asked, cleared the breakfast things before he'd finished his coffee, swept the floor, mended a tear in Sarah's coat that had been sitting on the chair for 2 weeks. She did these things quietly, without ceremony, the way a person does who is used to working. Sarah shadowed her constantly.
Not intrusively, more the way a cat follows a new person in the house, close enough to watch, but not close enough to touch until they decide it's safe. By the second morning, the distance had collapsed. Sarah had perched herself on the kitchen stool while Sona worked, and a steady low conversation had started between them that Eli could hear from the next room, but couldn't quite make out. He told he was watching the situation.
He was also, if he was being honest, listening to his daughter laugh for the first time in a while.
By the end of the first week, the house felt different. Sona cooked in ways Clara never had, dishes that used dried sage and juniper berries and roots Eli didn't recognize, things she had brought in a small bundle tied inside her blanket. The kitchen smelled different in a way that was hard to name. Warmer, maybe, more complicated.
The first night she made a stew with dried venison and something bitter and aromatic that he couldn't identify. He had eaten two bowls of it without meaning to. Sarah developed a fever the third day, the kind of low rattling cough that mountain winters specialize in, nothing dangerous but miserable. Sona went to the wood kit by the back door and asked Eli, through a mix of words and gestures, where she might find certain plants.
He walked her to the tree line and she gathered pine tips from the lower branches and yarrow from under the overhang where the snow hadn't reached the dried stalks. She brewed something that smelled like the forest floor and brought it to Sarah with honey mixed in. Sarah drank it because Sona asked her to. She was better in two days.
Eli had watched all of this. He kept watching. He noticed that Sona never moved through the house as if she owned any part of it. But she also never moved through it as if she were afraid.
She had a way of being still, genuinely still, not the nervous kind, but the kind that comes from being comfortable inside your that he had not seen in a person before. She could sit by the fire in the evening with her mending and be quiet for an hour and it was a real quietness, not an absence, a presence. He found himself sitting in the chair across the fire from her more often than he had intended to.
One evening Sarah had fallen asleep at the table over her school. Eli carried her up to bed and when he came back down Sona was still by the fire and the room was quiet. He sat down. Neither of them said anything for a while.