That the deed in her coat was the kind of thing that made sleep feel like abandonment. She was asleep in 11 minutes. She did not hear Gideon check the door latch. She did not hear him pull the extra quilt from the chest by the far wall and set it over Toby without waking him. She did not hear him sit back down at the table with his coffee gone cold, staring at nothing in particular, with the expression of a man who had just made a decision he hadn't entirely planned on making.
She was already somewhere else. Not peaceful, exactly. Not safe exactly, but somewhere warmer than she'd been in four months. Outside the temperature dropped another seven°. Inside the stove held.
She was still asleep when the argument started. Not an argument exactly. Get it wasn't the kind of man who argued. Not in the loud heat of the moment way that filled rooms and woke sleeping children. But when Orson Pike arrived the next morning before the sun had fully cleared the treeine, stomping snow off his boots on the porch and letting himself in the way a man does when he's been letting himself in for 20 years.
There was a quality to the conversation that followed that sat somewhere between a disagreement and a warning, and Mara heard most of it from the back room where Gideon had moved her before dawn, carried again without ceremony. When her ankle had swelled overnight to something she couldn't put a name to without frightening herself, she lay still and listened. Orson was shorter than Gideon brought her. With a gray beard he'd stopped trimming sometime around the previous winter, and a voice that carried the way voices do when a person has spent decades outdoors, assuming the wind would take half of everything they said. He hadn't noticed her boots by the door, or if he had, he hadn't connected them to anything yet.
Ror's men were in town yesterday evening, Orson said. She heard the scrape of a chair, the sound of coffee being poured. Asking after a woman, dark hair, youngish, traveling with a boy. Silence. Didn't post a notice, Orson continued.
Just asking. Quietly, you know what that means. I know what that means, Gideon said. Means he's not involving the law. Means whatever he wants with this woman, he doesn't want witnesses to the wanting.
Another pause. You seen anyone come through here? The silence that followed was long enough that Mara pressed her palm flat against the wall beside her as though that would help her hear better. What are they offering? Gideon asked.
Didn't say a number. Said generous. Which with Ror means enough that people who need money are going to start looking. Who in town is going to look. Amos Frey maybe.