He kept none of that to her that particular night, and she didn't press him to. Some things he was learning steadily from her own quiet example, are better given the same unhurried way a wound is given proper time to close clean, rather than rushed and reopened, for no better reason than wanting to be finished with the waiting sooner. But the next morning, and every ordinary morning after it, something had shifted plainly enough between the two of them, that even the rare ranch hand who rode through for supplies caught it without either of them ever giving a single word of explanation, the way she had taken to calling the ranch home rather than simply here. The way he had taken to bringing two cups of coffee out to the porch each evening instead of one, without either of them ever once discussing when exactly that particular habit had started. Autumn came on slow and gold that year, turning the cottonwoods along Antelope Creek, one leaf at a time.
And Kaia stayed straight through all of it, healing fully in body, long before either of them let themselves believe out loud that her staying had stopped being about healing at all. She never once brought up moving on to search for whatever remained of her scattered people. Though Rhett understood from the frost-bright morning she'd given him Sula's name, that the searching still sat quiet and constant somewhere underneath everything else between them, waiting, patient for spring, the way the land itself waited. He never pressed the subject himself, either some careful halfs superstitious part of him, unwilling to hand a solid shape to a fear he hadn't yet had to face straight on. They worked the ranch together, now his plain equal partners rather than as rescuer and rescued.
Her hands every bit as sure on the reins and the rope as his own had ever been. Her laugh no longer rare, no longer startled out of her by surprise. An ordinary welcome sound around the place that even the horses themselves seem to have grown fond of hearing. The harvest came in heavy that year, despite the long dry summer that had come before it, and one crisp evening, the two of them worked side by side, well past sundown, getting the last of the squash and dried beans stored against the coming winter, hands dusty, breath showing pale in the cooling dark, trading easy, done hurried talk about nothing much of consequence at all. Which of the two colts would take best to a saddle come spring?