Still sore at the end of long days. Still tender if she planted it wrong, but functional. Genuinely functional. She'd been walking without the crutch for 2 days slowly. And yesterday she'd made it across the full length of the yard and back without stopping.
She went to the window. Gideon was at the far fence line, visible through the bare cottonwoods, working on a post with the efficient movements she'd come to recognize. Orson was near the barn, doing something with a buckle on his saddle. Toby had come out of the barn and was standing near Gideon, not helping exactly, but present, watching the postwork with the serious attention he brought to everything Gideon did. She stood at the window for a while.
She was thinking about the farm. About what going back meant. The farm was her property now, legally, or would be once the void on the fraudulent transfer was completed. It was hers and Toby's. And it was the place where Thomas's life had been poured into the ground.
And it was also the place where the worst thing had happened. And it was also the only real thing she legally owned. And it was 60 miles from here. 60 miles. She noticed that she'd been measuring that distance in her mind in a specific way, not in the direction of going toward it, but in the direction of going away from it.
As though the relevant fact was not how far she would have to travel to get there, but how far it was from here. She pressed her forehead briefly against the cold glass of the window. Then she stepped back and went to start another pot of coffee. Because Gideon and Orson would be cold when they came in, and coffee was a practical thing to do, and she had learned from Gideon that practical things were what you did when you needed to think and couldn't stop moving. Gideon came back in when the light was going.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, reading the room the way he always did, a habit she'd identified by the end of the first week. The brief pause he took at thresholds, assessing, he looked at her at the table, looked at the fresh coffee, looked at Toby, asleep on the bench near the stove, with his coat still on, and his expression did the thing it did around Toby when he thought no one was watching. He came inside and closed the door. Orson's staying in the barn tonight, he said. His horse needs attention and he'd rather be close.
Is that true? Gideon poured himself coffee, probably about 60%. She almost smiled. She was finding that Gideon occasionally produced sentences that almost made her smile, which was something she hadn't expected from him, and was still slightly disorienting when it happened. I need to talk to you about something, she said.
He sat down across from her, wrapped both hands around the cup. Waited. The farm, she said. He nodded once, not as agreement, just acknowledgement. I've been trying to decide what I want to do with it.