The chimney housing was gone. A section of roof approximately 8 ft across had fallen in, and everything within a certain radium is a section destroyed the ceiling boards, a section of the ceiling boards, a section of the counter beneath, the window frame on the north wall, which had cracked from the heat. But the fire was out and the south counter was intact. The croc was still on it. She found this out when the smoke had cleared enough to go back in.
Wrapped in a proper coat someone had thought to bring out. Her feet finally in boots. She stood at the doorway of the damaged kitchen and looked at the destruction, the blackened hole in the ceiling, the debris on the floor, the ruin of 6 weeks of work in this space. And then she looked at the south counter and the croc sitting on it undisturbed. Jaime was right behind her.
He went past her to the counter and put his hand on the croc. "It's warm," he said from the fire. "But it's okay. " She looked at the croc at the kid standing in front of it in the ruined kitchen in his half-on sock, one hand on the clay, making sure she had rules about what she was allowed to feel. She suspended them for about 30 seconds. Then she said, "We need to move the kitchen operations to the bunk house tonight.
The men will need breakfast at the regular time. Tonight, Emmett said from the doorway. The morning comes whether we're ready or not, she said. She looked at the damage and the workable space and did the calculation she was always doing. Mateo, is the bunk house stove large enough to heat a pot for 12?
It's not made for Matteo started. Is it large enough? She said. He looked at the stove. He looked at her with the right pots.
Then we start moving. Then we start move. They moved through the remainder of that night with the particular efficiency of people who are too tired to do anything except the next necessary thing. The she set up a working kitchen in the bunk house with what could be salvaged from the damaged room. Organized the undamaged provisions back into a temporary storage arrangement.
And by the time the sky outside was going gray with early morning she had porridge on the bunk house stove and coffee proper coffee. Her coffee not terrible in the pot. The ranch hands came in for breakfast and did not complain once. Decker set his bowl down and said, "Tell us what needs doing today. " She told them. She had a list.
Of course, she had a list. The morning after the fire was also, as it happened, the morning Gideon Rusk said the second important thing he'd been not saying, and this time he said it better. She's in the makeshift kitchen, washing the breakfast bowls, her back to the bunk house door when she heard him come in. She knew his walk by now. She could have identified it in the dark, but she didn't turn around.
Her hands were in the washwater. The chimney was on my list, he said. I should have gotten to it. Yes, she said. You should have.
I'm sorry. She kept washing. The repair wasn't yours to do alone. I noticed it 3 weeks ago, and I mentioned it once, and I should have been more direct. She set a bowl on the drying board.
We both let it go. You could have lost the recipe book, he said. You could have stopped. She turned around. He was standing a few feet inside the door with his hat in his hands, and he looked like a man who had been awake all night, and who had spent some portion of that night, sitting with something that had frightened him in a way a blizzard hadn't.
"I watched you go into that kitchen," he said. "You went in for the book and the ledger, and I watched you go in, and I He stopped again. I need you to understand that there is nothing in that kitchen that I would not have let burn before I let something happen to you. " She looked at him. I know that you followed me. I followed you, he said, and I would do it again, but I need you to know.
He pressed on before she could speak. I know you haven't given me an answer. You said you needed time, and I told you to take it, and I meant it. But I stood in that yard last night counting heads, and when I got to yours, and you were there, his jaw worked. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your life.
I meant that. But I'm also not going to pretend this is simple for me. She dried her hands on her apron. She had spent six weeks building walls around what she was willing to want. She'd had done it carefully and deliberately and with good reason because wanting things had cost her before and the cost had been significant and she was not a foolish woman.
She knew what could happen when you built your life inside something that belonged to someone else. But she also knew, and this was the thing she had been circling for two weeks without landing on it, that the stone building beside the ranch changed the equation because it wouldn't belong to someone else. It would be hers. And what she would be choosing if she chose it was not shelter inside Gideon's life. It was a life that intersected with his two things, separate and also together.