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. She had not had a place that was hers to build. "Ask me again," she said.
He looked at her. "What you ask me in the study," she said. "Ask me again. " He held her gaze. "Will you marry me, Rosalie? " "Yes," she said. "On the condition that the building is mine.
The business is mine. " "My name is on whatever we put up above the door. " "Hartwell," he said without hesitation. whatever name you want and I'll have a written contract, she said, for the building. Not because I don't trust you, because I've learned that written things don't depend on the goodwill of the person who made the promise. He looked at her with something in his face that was not quite a smile and not quite pain, and was probably some of both. I'll have Harker draw it up. I'll draft it, she said.
Harker can witness it. This time he did smile fully, which she had not seen before, and it was a different thing on his face than she expected younger, and less guarded and considerably more difficult to look at without doing something she hadn't prepared for. "All right," he said. She turned back to the washwater. "The roof repair needs to start this week before the next weather comes. " "I know, and Roy needs to look at the chimney housing before we put any fire near it.
I've already talked to him. " Good. She washed the next bowl. Breakfast was adequate this morning, but the bunk house stove isn't going to manage the bread properly. I'll need to use the ranch house parlor stove for baking until the kitchen is repaired. Whatever you need, he said.
Go get your men started on the roof, she said. I'll have lunch ready at noon. She heard him go. She heard the bunk house door. She stood its windows.
She stood at the wash basin with her hands in the cooling water and she looked at the wall in front of her at the rough planks of the bunk house and she let herself feel what she was feeling for about 45 seconds. Then she finished the dishes. Spring came the way it always does in Wyoming grudgingly. In fits and starts, two warm days followed by a week of cold, the snow retreating and then reconsidering. The kitchen was repaired by mid-March with Royy's masonry work on the chimney better than what had been there before, which Roy pointed out with some frequency over the following weeks.