She stood up from the desk. The co truth. She went to the window and looked out at the gray afternoon and the stone building visible beside the road, and she thought about Cheyenne and what it had taken from her and what getting it back would mean. She thought about her mother's recipe book in its box on the kitchen counter. She thought up to its windows were dark.
The set Ato starter in its crock and what she had told Jaime that morning about how a starter didn't diminish when you gave part of it away. If I stayed, she said to the window, the building would still be mine. What I build there would be mine. That's not negotiable. It was never in question, he said.
And I'm not going to become invisible inside this house. I've been someone's employee for most of my adult life, and I've watched women become invisible when they married, and I won't do it. I would not know how to make you invisible if I tried," he said. "And I have not tried." She turned around. He was watching her the way he'd watched her in the stone building without commentary, just attention.
And she thought about how few people in her life had looked at her that way, like she was something worth paying attention to without needing to be managed or reduced or explained. "I need to think," she said. "I know. Don't look at me like that while I'm thinking." He looked at the ledger. She went back to the kitchen.
She did not make a decision that day. She made supper instead, a long, slow braze that needed attention every 20 minutes, which gave her something to undo with her hands while her mind worked through I things she'd been not thinking about for 6 weeks with increasing effort. She fed the starter. She set the table. She called the boys for supper.
And she served the food. And she ate at the counter the way to she always did. Day, watching the table, watching Gideon, watching Emmett tell his father something about the fence repair he'd helped with that afternoon. Watching Jaime eat with the focused application he brought to everything she put in front of him. She watched the table and thought, "This is not the same as what I had in Cheyenne.
Not a better version of what I had in Cheyenne. A different thing entirely." She went to bed. She did not sleep. She was still awake when the smell reached her. It was subtle at first, just a trace, the kind of thing you might dismiss as the stove settling or the wood burning unevenly.
She lay still for a moment, and then she was sitting upright in bed because her cook's nose had been in kitchens for 15 years, and it knew the difference between wood smoke and something burning that should not be burning. She was at her bedroom door before she was fully awake. The smoke was in the hallway, thin but real, coming from the direction of the kitchen. She went to the boy's room first. She did not stop to think about whether this was her place to do.