People could change. Not completely, not easily, not without something that cost them something real, but they could. He thought about himself standing at this gate 8 years ago, then a year ago, then 3 months ago when an old wagon had come up the road. He could, too, apparently.
But the night the last family left, the house went quiet for the first time in 2 months. Not the old quiet, not the 8 years quiet that had weight and texture and pressed in from every wall. This was different. It was the quiet of a house with four people in it who had all gone to their rooms at the end of a long day, and the quiet between them was inhabited rather than empty.
Caleb sat at the kitchen table. He didn't know how long he sat there. Long enough that the fire in the stove burned down from active to holding, the particular orange of well-established coals. He had his hands around a coffee cup that had gone cold, and he was thinking about the spring, which was visible now in the way that things become visible when enough of what was blocking them has been cleared away.
He was thinking about what he wanted the spring to look like. He'd been alone long enough that the habit of only making plans for one had become automatic, invisible, the thing you don't notice because it never occurs to you to do otherwise. Now he sat in the kitchen with the cold coffee and thought about spring, and it wasn't a solitary picture. It had never been, he realized, not since about 3 weeks into October.
At some point the picture had quietly reorganized itself to include four other people, and it had done this without his permission, and he hadn't noticed because he'd been busy with wolves and blizzards and cattle thieves and the arithmetic of feeding 11 people on six people's stores. The kitchen floor had a rug on it. There were curtains on the window. The wall in his room had a different picture now.
Not the photograph from the bottom drawer, not yet, but a drawing that Lucy had made of the ranch in November, recognizable if not precisely accurate, with a sun in the corner drawn with the particular sun style of a child who hasn't learned to be self-conscious about drawing suns, and he'd put it up without entirely deciding to. He got up and went down the hall and knocked on the door at the end. Two knocks and waited. Mara said, "Come in."
She was sitting on the edge of her bed in the lamplight, still dressed, her boots on the floor beside her. She had the account ledger open on her knee, not reading it, just holding it. She looked like someone who had also been sitting with something she hadn't finished thinking through. He leaned against the doorframe.
He didn't go in. He stayed at the threshold, which felt like the right place to be for what he was about to say. "I've been thinking," he said. "About what?"
She said. He looked at the wall over her shoulder, then at her. "About what this is," he said, "or what it's been becoming." She was very still.