That's the thing I want to prevent, not the big dramatic moments those take care of themselves eventually, mostly. It's the quiet moments when families run out of options and there's no door to knock on. Gideon was quiet for a long time, long enough that she wondered if she'd said too much, if she'd mistaken the nature of the conversation, if she'd misjudged the kind of man he was. But she didn't think she'd misjudged it. She'd been reading him for a week, and she was not a person who misread things when she was paying attention, and she had been paying very close attention.
It would need to be close to the road, he said finally. For people to find it. She looked at him. Your farm is off the southern approach. He said,"my land borders the main road on the east side.
If you build on your land, most travelers coming through wouldn't know it was there."He looked at the table."But if there were something closer to the road, something with a sign, something visible, the traffic coming through Ironwood Crossing might actually reach it."She understood what he was saying. He was saying it very carefully, very obliquely in the way of a man who did not want to appear to be saying more than he was ready to say. Your land, she said. The east parcel doesn't do much for me, he said. It's flat and the drainage isn't right for the kind of crops I'd want.
But it's visible from the road and it's a reasonable distance from the settlement. Gideon, he looked up. You're talking about giving me land. I'm talking about a practical arrangement, he said. That happens to use land that isn't serving its best purpose in its current configuration.
She looked at him for a long moment. At this man who had carried her out of the snow without asking why she was there, who had fed her son and not made anything of it. Who had stood with a rifle and let her do the talking because he'd understood that was what the situation required and who had not once told her what she should want or what she should decide or what the right answer was. Why? She said it was the question she hadn't asked before, the one she'd been careful not to ask because she hadn't been sure she was ready for the answer.
Gideon looked at her for a moment at Toby on the bench. At the window. Because when you walked out on that porch this morning, he said finally you could have hidden. I told you to stand visible and you did because you understood it was the right tactical decision. But that's not why you did it.
He looked at her. You did it because you were done being the person who hides. And the only thing worse than watching Roride away from that is watching you figure out you did it right and then go somewhere and be alone with it. Mara was very still. That's not a practical observation, she said.
No, he said it's not. The stove made a small sound, settling. Outside the wind had died down to nothing, and the dark was the particular dense dark of winter nights in the territory, when the clouds were low and absorbed everything. Toby shifted in his sleep. Mara looked at Gideon across the table, across the coffee cups, across the four days that had been longer than a month in the way that compressed time sometimes is.