And by the time the sky outside was going gray with early morning she had porridge on the bunk house stove and coffee proper coffee. Her coffee not terrible in the pot. The ranch hands came in for breakfast and did not complain once. Decker set his bowl down and said, "Tell us what needs doing today. " She told them. She had a list.
Of course, she had a list. The morning after the fire was also, as it happened, the morning Gideon Rusk said the second important thing he'd been not saying, and this time he said it better. She's in the makeshift kitchen, washing the breakfast bowls, her back to the bunk house door when she heard him come in. She knew his walk by now. She could have identified it in the dark, but she didn't turn around.
Her hands were in the washwater. 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 to 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 six 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.