I have Ferris looking at the budget. Tell him to look faster,"Orson said, and clicked his horse on. She watched him go. She went inside. Gideon was at the station's table with the supply ledger open, which he'd taken over, maintaining with the specific systematic attention he brought to anything that required being accurate.
He looked up when she came in. Francis gone safely. She sat down across from him. The Whitlock family is coming next week. Three children.
He made a note in the ledger. She watched him write. She watched his hands. The one with the badly healed scar and the one without moving across the page with the efficiency of a man who writes because it's necessary rather than because he finds it satisfying. She thought about everything those hands had done in the 8 months she'd known him the carrying in the building and the quiet maintenance of things.
The hand that had rested against the top of the wooden chest when he'd put Ruth's dress away. The knuckle that had pressed against hers in the courthouse gallery for two seconds. She thought about what she had said to Toby on the third day at the cabin when he'd asked if they were going home. Maybe we'll figure it out. She had figured it out.
It had not been the obvious answer. It had not been the answer that made the most external sense. The one she might have predicted for herself back in October when she'd walked out of the farm with the deed in her coat and Toby's hand in hers and no destination that felt real. It had required her to accept that home was not a place you returned to, but a thing you built from what you had available, including the grief and the scar tissue and the imperfect people who showed up willing to try. It required her to accept that she could love Thomas and still build something new.
Not instead of not in replacement alongside in the same life, just forward from the place where the grief had stopped being the only thing. It required her to accept a lot of things she'd been raised to think required more time and more certainty and more of herself being put back together first. She'd learned that you didn't always get to wait until you were put back together. Sometimes you built the new thing while you were still figuring out what the old thing had left behind. And the building was part of what put you back together, not a thing you did after.
Gideon, she said. He looked up from the ledger. The sign, she said. Above the door. What about it?
She looked at him steadily. I want to add something. He waited. Mercer station, she said. Below Vance, both names.