She could name no single thing he had required of her since the moment he'd set that canteen down on the flat rock between them. Not her name, not her story, not even simple gratitude given out loud. A debt with no stated price was still a debt. She knew that well enough from harder lessons than this one. But she found herself curious, against every careful instinct that had kept her alive this long, to see what kind of man kept his accounting so plainly absent from everything he did.
She walked back down off the ridge before the sun cleared the hills. And when Rhett came out to the well that morning, he gave no sign at all that he'd noticed she'd been gone the better part of an hour, or that her boots carried fresh dust from ground well past the yard's edge. She decided, watching him draw water without a single question in his face, that she would stay a while longer yet, and see what more, if anything, this particular stranger might want from her before she judged him fully. The days that followed settled into something neither of them named out loud. She kept nearly silent.
Hardly a sound passed her lips, in fact, for the better part of a week. But she watched everything, sharp-eyed and careful. The way a creature watches a country, it doesn't yet trust enough to walk through with its guard fully down. She watched him mend a hinge on the chicken coop with a patience that seemed at first to puzzle her plainly. She watched him gentle, a green colt in the round pen, using nothing but time and a soft voice, a method that plainly surprised her.
The first afternoon she caught sight of it through the crack of her door. She watched him leave a full plate outside that door morning and night without once knocking, without once making any claim at all on her in return. And Rhett came to understand slowly and without ever quite deciding to understand it. That this plain absence of expectation was the strangest gift he could possibly give a woman who had likely spent her whole short life being pressed for things, obedience, gratitude, an accounting of herself. He required nothing whatsoever of her.