She could have identified it in the dark, but she didn't turn around. Her hands were in the wash water. 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 tell 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 6 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. She had not had that before. She had had survival. She had had positions and rooms and borrowed spaces.