Some of them won't. Some of them will have already sold what they moved to or spent what little Ror paid them or built something new somewhere else. She looked up at Gideon. There's no version of this where it all just goes back to how it was. He was quiet for a moment.
No, he said. There isn't. So what it is instead is she stopped. Start it again. It's that it stops.
Whatever he's still doing, it stops. The people he hasn't gotten to yet, he doesn't get to them. She wrapped her hands around her empty cup. That has to be enough to be worth it. Gideon looked at her steadily.
Is it? She thought about Thomas, about the mine. About the company, Foreman's rehearsed condolences. I've decided it is, she said. That's different from it being easy.
He held her gaze for a moment longer than strictly necessary. And then he stood up and said she should sleep. And this time he said it differently, not as a practical suggestion, but as something quieter. Something that acknowledged he'd heard what she'd actually said. She went to the back room.
She slept. The third day began wrong. Not dramatically wrong. Nothing announced itself. No sound, no obvious signal.
Just the particular quality of the morning that made Gideon go still when he opened the door at first light standing in the doorway without stepping out, his hand on the frame. Reading something in the air that Mara couldn't read from where she stood behind him. What she said quietly. The birds, he said. She listened.
The silence he was pointing at resolved itself gradually. There should have been birds. There were always birds near the cottonwoods in the morning. Even in winter, small ones that moved through the brush in noisy clusters. There was nothing.