Small, but real. The next morning he came out with his coffee to find her saddling her horse. He watched her a minute. Then he said he'd ride to Mesa Hollow with her. He'd sign his name.
She went still with the cinch strap in her hand. He said he'd been keeping out of things long enough. Said the circuit judge was 10 days out. Said the grievance was just and his name on it was worth something in that county. Whether he liked the weight of carrying it or not.
"You understand what this will cost you. " She said. He said he understood well enough. Said he'd spent a long time whittling himself down to nothing worth losing. And it turned out not to be as comfortable as it sounded. She was quiet a moment.
Then she said those two words, the ones from the trail three years back. I see you as you are. "Teach me to say it back. " He said. She did. He said it badly.
She corrected him. He tried again, less badly. She nodded. They rode for Mesa Hollow that morning, side by side, under a sky gone huge and clear. The light in that country at that hour had a quality Caleb had never found a good word for.
It made the land look like it had been there a long time, and would be there a long time after. And that you were welcome to it if you could bear the terms. He'd spent two and a half years trying to want as little of it as possible. Riding south with Nayeli beside him, he found the country looked wider than it had in a while. Still hard, it was always hard, but wider.
And he was in it again, moving forward with someone who had looked straight at him and told him she could see what he was. Four months later, he rode the four days to the Dragoon foothills to find her. He had a question to ask. She knew what it was before he arrived, the writing itself told her. She said yes before he finished asking.
Her people marked it with a fire at night and the right words spoken over it, hands held in the smoke. It meant more to both of them than any courthouse record. But that was still ahead. For now, the morning held them.
The desert going rust and gold in the early light, the horses steady, the silence of that country the way it always was, big enough to get lost in. For once, Caleb Reyes had no interest in getting lost. He had somewhere to go and someone riding next to him, and the land between Mesa Hollow and wherever they ended up looked, for the first time in a long time, like something he was glad to be crossing.