No, he said she didn't panic. She noted with some distant part of herself that she wasn't panicking and that this was not bravery, but was just the thing that happened when you'd been afraid long enough that fear started to feel like normal operating pressure. How long until Orson gets back? He said 3 days. This is day three.
And if he's been delayed. Gideon went to the window. He stood with his back to her and she couldn't his face, but she could the set of his shoulders, which told her he was doing the same arithmetic she'd been doing. Then we don't wait for him, he said. Mara looked toward the back room where Toby was still sleeping.
She looked at the oil cloth packet on the table. She looked at her ankle. Which was better, genuinely better. Enough to put weight on now. Not comfortably, but possible.
What do we do? She asked. He turned around. We stop acting like people who are trying not to be found, he said. And we start acting like people who are ready, she looked at him.
At this man with the badly healed scar on his hand and the grief arranged around him like furniture he'd learned to navigate who had opened a door to two strangers and not asked a single question that didn't matter who had watched Toby find his way back to talking to horses and hadn't made anything of it because he understood what it was worth okay she said the word was small and the silence after it was large and somewhere in the distance on the south ridge Whatever had been watching turned and moved away through the snow. But it would come back. They both knew it would come back. Orson came back on the afternoon of the fourth day. Mara heard the horse before she heard anything else, a single rider moving fast.
Not the cautious approach of someone uncertain about where they were going, but the directed pace of someone who had been here before, and was in a hurry to get back. She was at the window before she'd consciously decided to move. One hand on the frame, watching the treeine. Gideon was already outside. She watched them greet each other in the yard.
No embrace, no dramatic relief, just two men standing close together, talking fast, and she read the urgency in the angle of Orson's body. The way he kept his voice low, even though there was no one near enough to hear. Gideon's head dipped once. Then he looked at the cabin window and found her there immediately, like he'd known she would be watching. He held up one finger.
Give me a minute. She stepped back from the window and made herself breathe. Toby was in the barn. She could hear him through the back wall, talking to Marjorie in the one-sided, serious way he'd developed over the past 3 days, explaining things to the horse with the thoroughess of someone who believes their audience is genuinely interested. She had watched this develop the way you watch something grow when you are too tired to fully acknowledge the relief it gives you.