Not the evaluating look, not the morning coffee look, not the look he got when he was handling something difficult. Something more unguarded than any of those. Something she was not prepared for. I see, she said. You'd have your reputation back, he said.
A good position references. Everything that was taken from you. Yes, she said. I wanted you to know that it exists, he said. Before he stopped.
Before what? He looked at the shelf behind her. At the carefully organized provisions she had spent the morning planning and the afternoon stacking. Before spring makes leaving harder, he said. She was not going to read anything into that.
She had a set of very clear rules. Thank you for telling me, she said. I'll think about it. She went back to the kitchen. She thought about it through supper preparation and through supper itself, eating at the counter the way she always did, watching the table where Gideon and Emmett and Jaime ate with the easy quiet of people who had been through something together and were still still in it and knew it.
She thought about Cheyenne, the Grand Hotel's kitchen, a position that was hers again, the one she'd built, the one Parish had taken. She thought about what it would mean to leave. She told herself not to think about what it would mean to leave. She thought about it anyway. The week after the storm broke had its own particular character, a forced reconstruction.
The ranch pulling itself back from the edge that the 8 days of weather had pushed it to. The north fence needed repair. Two outbuildings needed attention to their roofs. Three cattle that had been separated from the herd during the chaos were located alive but thin in a gully 2 mi east and needed bringing in. The men were working at the edge of their capacity, which Rosalie managed by adjusting the midday meal to compensate hotter, denser, sent out with the extra portions she'd held in reserve exactly for this kind of sustained demand.
Decker appeared at the kitchen door on Thursday morning. She had the beans on already. Cumin, she said without turning around, and she heard him exhale something that was almost a laugh. He came in and stood at the counter and watched her add the spice and then the chili and the smell came up from from the pot and he was quiet in a particular way. Like that?
She asked. Yeah, he said. Like that? She gave him a bowl to taste. He tasted it.