Turning it over in her memory the way you turn over a smooth stone was where everything began. The porch on the west side of the Harrington Fairgrounds was a simple thing. Weathered boards, a railing that needed replacing. A line of lanterns hung at wide intervals that gave more atmosphere than light. It was, as Nathaniel had promised, quiet.
The music from inside was muffled. The conversation was a distant hum. Out here there was just the warm summer dark, the smell of dry grass, and a sky so thick with stars it seemed almost too abundant, like someone had been generous to excess. Amelia leaned against the railing and breathed. You don't have to explain yourself, Nathaniel said.
He was standing a few feet away, hands in his pockets, looking out at the dark. I wasn't planning to, she said. He glanced at her. The small thing in his expression returned. No, I didn't think so.
He paused. Victoria's been that way for as long as I can remember. Since we were children, she's never found it comfortable when the lines she's drawn aren't where she left them. Women like her rarely, Amelia said, then stopped herself. It wasn't the kind of remark she usually made.
Not to strangers. Not to anyone really. But Nathaniel didn't look surprised or offended. He nodded slowly as if she'd said something he'd been considering himself. "You've been here long?" he asked.
"6 Years. Where before that?" "Cincinnati. And before that, overseas." She said the last part simply without detail, the way she always did. Most people didn't ask further. It was the particular mercy of the frontier.
People were generally more interested in where you were than where you'd come from. Overseas, he said he turned this over once. Long time away from home. This is home, she said. This is the longest I've stayed anywhere.
He looked at her with that direct attention again. Does it feel like it? It was such a strange question. No one had asked her that before, not once in six years. She considered lying.
She considered deflecting with something vague and polite. But there was something about standing in the dark outside a party where she'd just been humiliated in front of 200 people that made the usual small evasions feel particularly pointless. "Not always," she said honestly, but sometimes, he nodded like that was a real answer, and he'd received it as one. They stood for a moment without speaking. It was Amelia realized with a kind of quiet surprise, not an uncomfortable silence.