He won't come back here because the record is too solid now and because everyone in this territory who matters knows who you are and what you built and that you are not leaving. She looked at him. That's not nothing, she said. No, he said it isn't. The fire settled in the stove.
Outside, the wind moved through the pines on the north boundary. The sound she had been hearing for 4 months. The sound that was this place now. Her place as specific and identifiable as a name. I don't know what I'm asking, he said finally.
He said it the way a man says a true thing he has been sitting with for too long with the discomfort of honesty and the relief of being done with sitting on it. I know, she said. I'm not trying to I know what you're not trying to do, she said. You've been very clear about it. So clear that some days it's almost funny.
She said it without cruelty. He looked at the table. You didn't want me to feel like you wanted something from me, so you kept your distance even when you were in the same room. He was quiet. Henry is gone, she said.
The woman I was when I married him is not who I am now either. She believed things would work out because he believed they would, and that was enough for her. I can't do that anymore. I had to learn to believe things on my own terms. She paused.
That's not a better way to be. It's just what I am now. And what is that? He said, "Someone who needs a thing to be real before she can trust it." She said, "Someone who needs to see the joints before she'll stand on the floor." "That's fair," he said. I'm not asking you to convince me of anything, she said.
I'm saying I see what's in the room. I've been seeing it for a while. I just needed the land to be settled before I could look at anything else directly. And now the land is settled, he said. And now the land is settled, she said.