She did not sleep much that night. She lay in her bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about a stone building beside a ranch road with a good chimney and a view of the supply route to Laramie and Casper. She thought about what a kitchen in a building like that could produce in a week if properly stocked. She thought about the women in Red Hollow and the settlements nearby who were doing what she had been doing, cooking in other people's kitchens, surviving on other people's judgment of their worth. She thought about her mother's recipe book.
She thought about Cheyenne. She thought about the morning coffee and how she had stopped having to fix it as much because Gideon had without comment started making it slightly less strong each week. She thought about a lot of things she had rules against thinking about. In the morning she came downstairs and the coffee was made and it was almost right and Gideon was sitting at the table with his hands around his cup and he looked up when she came in. "I'd like to see the building," she said.
He nodded after breakfast. She poured her coffee. She sat down. I haven't decided anything. She said, "I know.
The Cheyenne position is real. I know that, too. " She looked at her cup. "You're not going to try to talk me out of it. " "No," he said. "It's your life. I'm not going to tell you what to do with it. " He looked at the window at the gray morning light on the snow.
"I just want you to have all the information before you make up your mind. " She looked at him. He looked back. "All the information," she said. All of it," he said. And then he looked at his coffee, and she looked at hers, and neither of them said the next thing, but it was there in the kitchen with them, taking up space, asking something neither of was quite ready to answer yet.
She drank her coffee. He drank his. Outside, the wind moved across the frozen yard of Blackthornne Ranch, and somewhere in the near barn a horse made a sound, and the house held itself together against the cold, the way it had been doing all winter, not perfectly, not without effort, but steadily and so far without failing. The stone building waited beside the ranch road under its coat of snow, its good chimney pointing at the pale January sky, saying nothing. The way buildings do, patient as anything. and Rosalie Hartwell, who had come to Blackthornne Ranch with one suitcase and a recipe book and nowhere left to go, sat in its kitchen on a January morning, and felt for the first time in as long as she could honestly remember that the next thing was not something she was running toward because the last thing had fallen apart.
The next thing was something she was choosing. She wasn't finished choosing yet, but she had started. The stone building was smaller than she'd imagined from Jaime's drawing and larger than she'd expected from Gideon's description, which meant it was exactly the right size for what she was beginning against her better judgment to picture. He took her out to it after breakfast, like he'd said, the morning was cold, and still the kind of stillness that comes after sustained wind, when the world seems to be catching its breath. The snows around the building was undisturbed except for animal tracks along the south wall and the door stuck from ice along its bottom edge and Gideon had to put his shoulder to it to get it open.
Inside it smelled like cold stone and old hay and the particular emptiness of a space that has been waiting without knowing what it was waiting for. She walked through it slowly. The chimney was on the north wall, built wide and substantial the way chimneys were built. when someone knew what they were doing. She put her hand near the flu and felt the draw. Even with no fire, it was working.