She put her hand near the flu and felt the draw. Even with no fire, it was working. The floor was packed earth, which was not ideal, but was workable. Two windows southacing, which meant light in the afternoon when baking was most demanding. The space was roughly 30 ft by 20, enough for a good oven, a work counter along one wall, a display counter along another, and four or five small tables if she chose to go that far.
She stood in the middle of the floor and turned slowly. Gideon stood near the door with his arms crossed and watched her look at the building the way she'd watched him look at his ledgers. Without commentary, just attention. The floor would need flag stone, she said. Earth doesn't hold up to constant kitchen traffic and water.
There's a quarry deposit 2 mi east, he said. Mateo knows it. I'd need a proper oven built, not a cook stove, a brick or stone baking oven with a separate fire chamber. Roy did masonry work before his knee went. He said he's told me twice he's bored in winter.
She looked at him. You've been thinking about this. I noticed the building had a good chimney, he said. Neutral. Not quite innocent, Gideon.
He looked at the floor. Maybe more than I've let on, he said. But still your decision. She looked back at the space, at the south windows, and the cold light coming through them, and the way it fell across the packed earth floor in long pale rectangles. She thought about bread cooling on a counter in that light.
She thought about the women she'd met in Cheyenne, in boarding houses, in hotel kitchens, doing exactly what she'd been doing, surviving inside other people's structures with no floor of their own to stand on. If I built this, she said very carefully, it would be mine, not part of the ranch, not operated under Blackthornne's name. Its own thing. I'd expect nothing different, he said. And if I chose Cheyenne instead, this conversation didn't happen.
That's also fine, he said. But something in his voice was doing something he wasn't controlling fully. And she heard it, and she filed it, where she filed most things about Gideon Rusk, somewhere she was still deciding what to do with. She walked to the south window and looked out at at the ranch road. A wagon could stop there without blocking the track.
A sign hung above the door would be visible from a good distance in either direction. I'll think about it, she said. I know, he said. That's all I'm asking. They walked back to the house in the cold morning light and she made lunch and she kept thinking about it for the next week with a focused persistence that began to feel less like deliberation and more like something she had already decided.