She looked at her hands on the table. "You're not in the clear," Sims said with the honesty that made him worth what he charged. "There will still be maneuvers. " "Fletcher isn't a man who accepts a situation when he can still fight it. " "But you're in a defensible position. That's different from where you were 2 months ago. " After Sims left, they sat at the kitchen table. Gideon and Vivien in the quiet of a house where Elsie was napping and the fire was good and the world outside was frozen and white and entirely still.
Two months ago, Vivien said eventually she said it like she was measuring the distance. I sat in a train car with that trunk in the luggage car and a false name and I tried to figure out what I was willing to do. She looked at the table. I thought I was willing to disappear, to be someone else entirely, to not to give up on the person I'd been and just become whatever this was going to require. He listened.
I didn't, she said. Give it up. I'm not sure when that happened. Somewhere between the firewood and the blizzard, I think. He looked at her across the table.
The light in the kitchen was the particular gray white of December in Montana, flat and honest, and in it she looked like exactly what she was, tired and real, and nothing like the woman he'd watched descend from that train, or rather like a version of that woman that had shed everything unnecessary. The trunk, he said. What happens to it after she thought about it? I don't know. When the estate is settled, she stopped.
Hargreav thinks there's a possibility of a settlement with Harlon. He doesn't want a public fight anymore than I do. If we can find an arrangement that gives him some face while keeping the core of what my father intended, she paused. I might not need the trunk the way I've needed it. The documents might go to lawyers and courts and safe deposit boxes.
She looked toward the root cellar and then it's just a very heavy piece of furniture. I was thinking, he said, it might make a good bench. She looked at him. In the main room, he said, sturdy. It's the right height and it's got those iron fittings.
It would last. She was quiet for a moment. Something changed in her expression. Not dramatically, not the sudden crack of emotion, but a slow shift, the way light changes on a hillside when a cloud moves off it. A bench, she said.