Yes, she said. The important part. He thought about this. So, we can stop running. She hadn't used that word with him.
She'd been careful about the language she used, careful to frame their weeks of movement as traveling and getting to a safe place rather than the word that was actually accurate. That he'd arrived at the right word on his own, told her he'd understood more than she'd known. Yes, she said. We can stop running. He was quiet for a moment.
Then are we going home? And there it was. The question she hadn't let herself think about fully yet, because thinking about it fully required sitting with what home meant now, required acknowledging that the farm he meant was the farm where Thomas was still somehow present in the things he'd built and the ground he'd turned. That going back was both the obvious answer and not simple in any way. Maybe, she said.
We'll figure it out. He seemed to accept this. He went back to the barn. That night had a different quality from the ones before it. Not relaxed.
Mara didn't think she was capable of relaxed yet, and she suspected that whatever came next with Ror's legal situation would bring its own category of difficulty before it brought resolution. But the specific tension of imminent physical danger had lifted, and in its place was something quieter and harder to name. The kind of stillness that comes after something has been let go. When the body hasn't caught up yet with what the mind has decided. Orson cooked.
This surprised her slightly. She hadn't pictured him as a man who cooked, but he produced a serviceable elk stew from what was in Gideon's larder with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been feeding himself in remote. Places for decades and had no illusions about cuisine. It was hot and it was enough, and that was what mattered. They sat at the table together, the four of them, for the first time.
Toby had graduated from floor level to an actual chair, elevated on a folded blanket, and he ate with the focused appetite of a child who had been rationing for weeks, and was only now beginning to believe that rationing was no longer required. Gideon watched him eat the way he'd been watching Toby all week, not hovering, not drawing attention to it, but consistently aware. The way a person watches something they've decided is worth watching. Mara noticed this. She'd been noticing it since the second day when Toby had started following Gideon to the barn and Gideon had not turned him away.
She'd watched a kind of learning happen between them that didn't require language, the transmission of practical knowledge, of how to hold a tool, of how to read an animal's posture, of how to approach a task without drama. Toby had absorbed all of it with the hunger of a child who had been missing exactly this kind of instruction and hadn't known how to name what was missing. Orson, Toby said, pointing his spoon at the stew in a way that Mara started to correct, then didn't. Is this what you eat all the time? When I have it, Orson said,"what do you eat when you don't have it?