She looked at her own cup. The obvious answer is go back. Rebuild what's there. It's mine and Toby's. It makes practical sense.
She paused. But I've also been thinking about the families that are going to come out of Ror's investigation with voided transfers and partial remedies and nowhere to go in the meantime. Or people who were never part of his operation but are in the same situation I was in. Widows, families, people on the frontier without resources or connections. She stopped.
She was aware that what she was about to say sounded like the kind of plan that a person in her situation had no business making, given that she was currently dependent on someone else's cabin and someone else's food and someone else's protection. But the plan had been forming anyway, the way things form when they're ready, regardless of whether circumstances are convenient. I want to use part of the land, she said, to establish something. A station, a place where people in the kind of situation I was in can come to. Temporary shelter, food, if we can manage it, help connecting to legal resources.
She looked up at him. I know what it sounds like. It sounds like something you've been thinking about for a while, he said. Since the second night I was here, actually, she held his gaze. When I understood that Toby running to your door was the only reason we're sitting here instead of somewhere else entirely.
And I thought about all the people who run to a door and nobody opens it. Gideon was quiet. He looked at his coffee. He looked at Toby sleeping on the bench. It would require money, he said, to build on to stock.
To maintain. I have the farm once the void goes through. It's more land than Toby and I need on our own. I can sell part of it. She thought about this.
I'll have to be careful how I do it. Make sure whatever I build is legally clean and can't be taken the way the farm was taken. Ferris can help me structure it. Whitlock probably knows people. You've thought about the structure.
I've had time to think. She paused. And you said something in the first few days. You said Ror took the Heartley place when they needed money and needed it fast and had no one to help them structure a better option. She looked at him.