"People always are," he said. "About you specifically." She set a sack of flour on the counter. "About the arrangement."
"What about it?" She looked at him with the patience of someone who's used to speaking plainly to people who would rather she didn't. "Hutchins has been saying you've taken leave of your senses, that a widow with three children is going to eat through your winter stores before February, and you'll be the one who comes up short." She set a tin of lard down next to the flour.
"He's also saying other things." "What kind of other things?" She paused. "The kind that are about the nature of the arrangement," she said carefully. He understood what she meant.
He set his jaw. "The nature of the arrangement," he said, "is exactly what I told you it was. She cooks. I provide board. That's the full length and width of it."
"I know that," Margaret said. "I'm not the one you have to convince." "I'm not going to convince anyone of anything," he said. "It's my ranch. What happens on it is my business."
"That's true," she said, "and I agree with you. I'm just telling you what's being said, so you're not surprised by it." She looked at him evenly. "The Perrin family stopped coming to Mara at the trading post, just so you know."
He picked up the flour sack. "Anyone who wants to be small about it can be small about it," he said. "That's not new." "No," she said.
"It's not." He drove home with the supplies and didn't tell Mara what Margaret had said, because there was no version of telling her that made anything better. But he noticed later in the week that Mara came back from a trip to the trading post quieter than she'd gone, and that she spent more time in the kitchen than usual that evening working at something. Bread, probably, though there was already bread, with the focused energy of a woman who is using her hands to keep her mind from dwelling somewhere it doesn't want to be.
He didn't bring it up. She didn't bring it up. But at supper that night, he said, in the middle of a conversation about nothing in particular, "You don't have to go to Danner's if you'd rather not. I can get what's needed."