And she was sitting at a man's kitchen table in the winter light. And she was in the most literal physical sense still here. I need to think, she said to no one in particular. Gideon had been near the stove. He moved away from it, took his coat off the peg.
I need to check the fence line, he said, which was the most purely Gideon way of giving her space, not announcing that he was giving her space, just identifying a practical task that would take him outside. Orson, taking the queue with his own particular version of Grace, said he needed to to his horse, and followed. The cabin was empty except for Mara and the sound of the stove and the distant sound of Toby in the barn talking to Marjorie. She picked up the oil cloth packet. She held it in her hands.
She thought about Thomas. She let herself think about him fully without cutting it off, which she hadn't done since the morning she left the farm, because thinking about him fully while she was moving, made her stop moving, and stopping was not something she could afford. She thought about his hands, which were the things she remembered most specifically, the way they looked when he was working, not gentle hands, not the hands of someone who did light work, but hands that knew what they were for and were good at it. She thought about the morning he went to the mine, the last ordinary morning, the last morning where the word ordinary still applied. She didn't cry.
She'd done her crying in the first two weeks after the mine, alone in the farm kitchen at night while Toby slept. And then she decided that crying was something she would do later when she had somewhere to do it safely, and she'd put it away, and it had stayed put. She was not sure that was healthy in any formal sense. It had kept her alive. What she did was put the oil cloth packet down on the table flat and press both hands on top of it for a moment.
Then she let it go. Not the document. She wasn't ready to fully let go of the document. It was still evidence, still part of a legal process, still something she needed to account for in her testimony. But the carrying of it, the way she'd been holding it like a weapon and a wound simultaneously, like if she held it tightly enough, it would undo something, bring something back.
She let that part go. She looked around the cabin. At the mended socks back in the basket, at Toby's boots near the door, the ones that didn't match. At the coffee cups on the shelf, three of them now, since Orson had been here long enough that there was a cup with a chip in the rim that had become his by default. She thought about what she had said to Gideon on the porch when he'd asked if accepting what she couldn't undo was enough.
She had said she had decided it was. She sat with that decision now, turned it over and found it still held. It was not enough in the sense of making things right. It was enough in the sense of being what was possible. That was a different kind of enough, and it required a different kind of acceptance than she had been raised to think.
Acceptance meant not resignation, not peace. Exactly. But the willingness to keep moving while carrying the weight of what couldn't be fixed, and to do it without pretending the weight wasn't there. She stood up. Her ankle felt different now than it had a week ago.