"In 5 weeks you fixed things I didn't ask you to fix. Grew things on ground I'd written off. Healed my mare in 30 seconds when I couldn't get close for a week." He looked at her. "And last night you handled three armed men while I stood there trying to remember where my feet were."
She was watching him carefully. "The men in your camp were afraid of that," Cole said. "I'm not." A beat. "That's not bravery," he said.
"That's just honesty. I'm not afraid of you. I'm relieved. I'm glad you're here. And I'd like us to stop being strangers, too.
If that's something you're willing to try." He put his hand on the table, palm up, not grabbing, just there. "Available. Partners," he said. "Not chief's daughter and rancher.
Just partners." Kaya looked at his hand. Biscuit made her breakfast noise outside. The light moved on the floor. She put her hand over his rough palm.
Warm. The hand of someone who works hard and has for a long time and makes no apology for it. "Partners," she said. And then, because she was exactly who she was, she picked up her coffee and drank. Cole sat there with the warm imprint of her hand on his and the morning coming through the window golden level and thought, well, all right then.
He rode to Tucson 3 days later, left at dawn, told Kaya where he was going and approximately how long it would take, which she received with the nod that meant, I understand. Proceed. He left her with the rifle and both good horses and did not worry about her safety because he had enough information by now to understand that worry in her direction was in this specific case redundant. The county recorder's office was a small building staffed by a man named Arguello, who seemed genuinely pleased to have something interesting to process. Cole laid out his documentation, the cord from the ceremony, a written account, and a letter from Gray Elk that River Wolf had sent ahead by messenger 2 weeks earlier.
Cole had understood receiving it that it was not a coincidence. River Wolf had known Cole would need it. River Wolf had planned accordingly. It's irregular, Arguello said. Yes, tribal ceremony only, no county record.
What would you need, Cole said, to make it regular? They talked for 2 hours. Cole left with a list of additional documentation and a provisional acknowledgement. One Kaya, wife of Cole Hargrove, was a legal resident of the Hargrove property in the Dustfall District of Pima County pending further paperwork. Provisional, pending but not gone.
He bought new boots, both soles, no holes. And a small thing he saw in the window of the dry goods store that he didn't examine his own reasoning about and put in his saddlebag. He was back on the third evening coming up the road in the particular blue of desert