Threatening, which was almost worse. Caleb's hands went up. The morning seemed to stop. Then something hit the dirt hard between him and the horses. A rock.
Loud crack as it landed. The horses shied. Two of the men were immediately busy with their own animals. The pistol man looked up. Nayeli was on the cabin roof.
She'd gone out the back window and climbed up. Standing at the peak, balanced three more rocks in her hands, not smiling. Horses don't deliberate. Two of them spun and bolted a hundred yards before their riders got them stopped. And in that mess, the pistol went away because things had gone sideways enough that waving a gun at a man on his own land in front of potential witnesses was no longer the smart play.
The men rode off. Not hard. They left with the careful bearing of people who intend to tell it differently later. But they left. Caleb watched them until they were small.
Then he looked up at the roof. Nayeli looked down at him, still had the rocks. "I told you to go inside," he said. "I did go inside," she said. "Then I went up. " He stood there a moment and then he laughed.
A real laugh from somewhere he hadn't been in two and a half years. Strange sound in his own ears. Not unwelcome. Like a room he'd locked up and forgotten about. She climbed down.
That evening the talk came easier. Not the careful, tentative kind from the first days, but something more like the conversation of people who had just come through something together and both knew it. She told him about being 9 years old and climbing the tallest pine at the edge of camp to prove to her older brother she could. Getting stuck halfway down and her mother standing at the base doing nothing. Not calling up, not moving to help, just watching to see how Nayeli would work it out.
She worked it out. She always did. He told her about Clara properly this time, with the real details. The way Clara laughed at her own jokes before she got to the punchline. The way she'd argue out loud with the photograph of her own mother on the wall.
The beef stew she made every Sunday that was never quite right. And that he told her was perfect every single time he ate it. "That was kind. " Nayeli said. "It was selfish. " He said. "I didn't want her to stop making it. " She smiled at that.