And the second one was harder in every physical sense and truer in every way that mattered. And she had not seen that coming. And she was grateful for it. In the way you're grateful for the things that change you without your permission, the things that turn out to have been exactly what you needed even though you never would have chosen them. The trunk came out of the root cellar in May.
Gideon brought it up himself, his shoulder fully healed by then, and set it in the main room. And they looked at it for a moment. This object that had traveled 3,000 miles full of fear and documentation and hidden gold. This thing that had meant so many different things to each of them since the afternoon. Four men and a profanity had unloaded it onto a Montana platform.
"Still think it would make a good bench," he said. "I know a carpenter in town," she said. He could add a top, something flat, maybe with a cushion. Cushion might be pushing it. A cushion, she said firmly.
He looked at her. She looked back with the expression that had replaced the composed mask. Something warmer and more specific. The expression of a woman who was entirely aware of what she wanted and was not the least bit apologetic about it. "Fine," he said.
"A cushion. " The carpenter came the following week and worked the ironbound trunk into a bench with a fitted lid that opened for storage and a cushion covered in dark wool that Vivien had chosen from what was available at the general store, which was not much, but was something. It sat in the main room against the wall below the window, and Elsie immediately claimed it as her preferred reading spot, and it fit there as though it had always been there, which Gideon supposeded in the way that mattered it had. He thought sometimes about what it held, the framework of it, the iron and the dark wood and the weight of it. Still spoke of the thing it had been, the locked container, the hidden life. But the lid opened easily now.
There was nothing inside that needed to be hidden. Elsie kept her smooth stones in it, and her collection of bird feathers, and two spare scarves, and the cloth doll, with the golden thread at its seam, which sat on top of everything else presiding. What is mended with love becomes stronger than before. He had heard Vivien say that to Elsie one November night with a snow-covered ranch outside and a fear she was carrying the weight of alone, and he had stood in his kitchen and not known yet what to make of the woman in his house. He knew now.
He knew the full inventory of her, the stubbornness and the competence, and the particular pride that made her go back to Agnes the cow after being kicked rather than retreat. The way she cried quietly and went outside rather than making anyone witness it. The laugh she had that she didn't deploy often, but that when it came was completely unguarded. The way she looked at Elsie when Elsie wasn't looking. The way she had walked into a white out blizzard with a rope around her waist for a man she had known for 6 weeks.