Whatever they he stopped because his voice had done something he hadn't expected. A slight rough thing he controlled before it could become more. They'll be all right. The fire went outside. The wind had come up again, pressing at the north wall with that steady Wyoming insistence.
Odora looked at him for a long time. Her expression had done something he couldn't read, something that moved in it and then stilled. "You think I'd leave for Fort Collins?" She said slowly. "And you're going to tell me to go?
I think you might leave." And yes, why? He looked back at the fire because it was easier than looking at her when he said this. Because if I ask you to stay for the wrong reasons, it won't be staying. It'll just be being held in place.
And you've spent enough of your life being useful to people without being. He stopped again. I'm saying it badly. No, Odora said. Her voice was strange.
Not upset. Something quieter than upset. You're saying it quite clearly. He looked at her then. Her face had settled into something that was not an expression he recognized from the past eight weeks of knowing her.
Not the capable professional look, not the watchful caretaker look, not even the private almost smile she sometimes is aimed at the bread or the window. It was something more open than any of those. She picked her mending back up. She made a stitch a single careful stitch and then she said without looking at him. I haven't decided yet.
I know. I'll tell you when I have. All right. They sat by the fire. Tilda's voice drifted in from the kitchen.
Somewhere above, Marin's footstep crossed the floor her particular tread, deliberate and even. The step of a girl who has been moving carefully through the world since she was 10 years old. Garrick listened to it and thought about his daughter upstairs in her burgundy dress, systematically preparing herself to survive another woman leaving. He thought about Odora's cedar trunk with its bare boards. He thought about what it had cost her to cut that lining out.