You have a home here for as long as you want one.
That's not what the question is about." She waited."I know you have your people," he said."I know you have a whole life that was yours before you knocked on my door, and I'm not trying to ask you to trade that." He stopped.
He was not doing this gracefully, and he knew it. I am asking if you would be willing to stay. Not as work for shelter, as something more than that. Sona looked at him.
The evening light came through the window over the sink and caught the side of her face, and he thought of what her name meant and how it fit."I have been watching you," she said."Since the first morning.
The way you are with Sarah. The way you fixed the fence in the cold without complaining.
The way you turned your back at the stove so I could have a moment." She put both hands on the table."I know what you are asking." "And?" he said.
She was quiet a moment.
Outside, one of the meadowlarks was going, calling its spring call down from the ridge."My people do not decide these things quickly," she said."And I am my mother's daughter.
I do not decide them quickly, either." She looked at him steadily."But I have not been gone.
It was not a yes, and it was not a no. It was something truer than either. And Eli understood it for what it was. The same bargain she had offered at the door in the blizzard, stripped to its bones.
I am here. I will stay." He put his hand on the table next to hers. Not on it. Next to it.
She looked down at his hand, then back up at him, and the corner of her mouth moved the way it did sometimes when she found something almost funny. He left his hand there. She left hers where it was. The meadowlark called again from the ridge.
The coals in the stove settled. The house held them in its warmth, and outside, the San Juan country was slowly deciding to be spring.