Those things were real and had weight. And she was not the kind of person who looked away from real things. But she had also not decided to leave. And that was real, too, and she was choosing to let him know it. Your shoulder.
I think it needs another session. She looked at him levelly. Your shoulder's been fine for 4 days. Felt a little tight this morning. You are lying.
I am, he agreed without embarrassment. For the first time in all the days she'd been there, Sadie smiled fully. Brief, transforming, gone, but it had been there, and he'd seen it. "I will go in 4 days. I will take the medicines to my people.
Then I will come back. " He nodded once, slow and careful, not wanting to push anything. "The herb garden. If I'm not here to clear it properly before the frost, you'll lose what came back. " "I don't know what I'm doing with a garden. " "I know that. " She picked up the medicine bundle and set it beside her bedroll, ready. "That's why I'm coming back. " She paused, and he could see her maintaining her seriousness with a small deliberate effort. "Also, your shoulder will genuinely tighten again if no one attends to it.
That is not a lie. The joint needs regular care. " He almost laughed. A sound surprised out of him before he caught it. She rode out on the fourth morning. He stood at the corral fence and watched her go, the paint mare moving easy on the trail east, Sadie's back straight and her hair braided and the medicine bundle tied behind the saddle.
She didn't look back until she reached the bend where the trail turned through the cottonwoods. Then she did, and he raised his hand, and she did the same, and then the cottonwoods were between them, and she was gone. He stood there a moment. Then he got a shovel and went to the kitchen garden. The days that followed had a texture he hadn't expected.
He had thought absence would feel like the old grief, the formless, pressing weight of a house emptied of Anna, but this was something different. This was the absence of a specific sound and a specific weight in the air, the sound of someone working alongside him in the pre-dawn quiet, the presence of someone whose attention was elsewhere in a room, and made the room feel inhabited in a way a man alone couldn't create for himself no matter what he did. He rose at the usual hour each morning and went through the usual work, and the work got done the same as always. But the quality of the silence had changed. Before Sadie, it had been the silence of a man who had stopped expecting it to lift.