She looked at her hands on the table. I have opinions about everything and I say them. I get angry and when I'm angry, I go quiet instead of saying so, which is its own problem. I don't forgive quickly.
I keep records of things people do wrong in my head and I take them out sometimes when I should have left them alone. She looked up at him. I'm telling you the real parts. I know the real parts, he said.
I've been living with the real parts for 4 months. Then you know what you're choosing. Yes, he said I do. She looked at him and thought, "This is a good man.
Not a perfect man. Not a man without rough edges or silences he couldn't get past or grief he still carried in ways he probably couldn't name. Just a good man with a ranch and a baby and a particular kind of steadiness that didn't announce itself. The kind that was just there underneath everything.
Reliable in the way that things were reliable when they were built honestly. I love you too, she said. I've been careful about it because careful seemed right. But I do.
He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. Not a dramatic gesture, just that his hand over hers on the kitchen table where they'd been sitting since September, and the fire burned low, and Caleb slept down the hall, and the Wyoming night held the house the way it always did, total and enormous. And inside it, this one small room with its lamp and its warmth, and these two people sitting across from each other with their hands on the table. She turned her hand over and held his.
That was all. That was enough. Outside the wind picked up and moved across the open land and shook the bare branches of the two trees at the edge of the yard. The trees she'd come to think of as landmarks as the things you saw from the kitchen window that told you where you were.
The fire settled. The lamp held steady. She sat there and she thought, "I am here. I am where I came to be.
I don't know if I came here looking for this or just looking for somewhere I wouldn't be turned away from. And maybe those two things were never as different as I thought. Nathan didn't let go of her hand. She didn't let go of his.
March came in hard that year, the way Wyoming March usually did, not with any softening of winter, but with a kind of aggressive uncertainty. Warm enough one afternoon to make you think something had changed, and then cold enough by morning to remind you that nothing had. Not yet. Not quite.