Most of the time Klay chose the second. They shared their meals because there was no practical way around it. One table, one stove, the same pans, plates, and cooking tools. Those first days were filled with silence. Not peaceful silence.
Careful silence. Clay asked brief questions. Nia answered with only what was necessary. He passed her the bread or salt before she had to ask. She filled his coffee cup before he could rise to do it himself.
Crestfield lay about 12 mi away along the stage road. On the eighth day, Clay rode into town alone for supplies. When he returned, he found the shed roof completely repaired. Nia had taken pine boards from the old lumber pile behind the barn, cut them to fit, and laid them down one at a time. Clay stood there for several moments studying the work.
Then he looked at her. Rain used to come through that hole. "Yes," she said. "It did." That was all.
Clay let his horse into the barn without adding another word. While he had been in Crestfield, he had said nothing about Nia being at the ranch. He would not have known how to begin such a conversation, even if he had wanted to. He knew Ezra Bell, the storekeeper, Clara Dunn, the blacksmith's wife, and several men from the Crestfield cattleman, who usually gathered at the same saloon. Most of them were not bad people at heart.
But the territory still carried too many memories from the old conflicts with the Apache, and changing a man's mind out there was slow work, sometimes nearly impossible. Klay had learned a long time ago that expecting people to change was usually a good way to be disappointed, and he had reason to be careful. During that first week, another feeling began to settle over him, something he had not expected. It was not guilt over allowing Nia to stay beneath his roof. It was older than that.
Whenever he checked the cattle at dawn, his thoughts drifted back to Toma. He remembered the low sounds the old man had made through the night, and that small movement of his hand when Clay brought water to his mouth, as though Toma had been reaching for something already beyond his grasp. Clay also kept thinking about the little medicine pouch. He had left the string of beads around Toma's wrist because it had seemed right, but he had not moved the pouch. He had stood there wondering whether he should leave it where it was or bury it with the old man.
In the end, he had done neither. As the days went by, Clay began to wonder whether that had been a mistake. He wondered if the people who later came for Toma's body had been angry at what they found or at what they did not find. More than once, he considered asking Nia about it. He never did.
During those first days, Toma's memory remained between them like a wound neither of them was ready to touch. Nia carried something heavy inside her, too. Clay noticed it most clearly when she thought no one was watching. At the end of each day, once the work was finished, and there was nothing left for her hands to do, her face would go still for a few moments, almost empty, as though grief had finally found a narrow opening and stepped into the light before she pushed it back into hiding. The moment never lasted long.