You deserved better than that. He kept it plain, the same unadorned way he'd met her question that first evening on the porch, and she turned to look at him a long moment in the fading light, something working behind her dark eyes that he couldn't quite read, and didn't try to rush. She didn't answer in words. She only nodded once, slow, like she was accepting something she hadn't fully allowed herself to believe a stranger could give until this particular man on this particular stretch of dry land had gone and given it to her anyway, plate by silent plate and patient core by patient core for five whole unhurried weeks running. Not everyone in the territory proved so easy to face down as the loudmouthed rancher on that first supply run.
A stranger rode through the settlement in the season's later weeks, unhurried and watchful, asking around the trading post after an Apache woman answering a description close enough to Kaia's that word of it reached the ranch within the day carried by a neighbor boy who thought Rhett ought to know. The stranger claimed no lawful business, only vague talk of a debt owed and a reward posted by men who, when Rhett described the fellow to her, made Kaia go pale and still. Men who had ridden with the very raiders who'd burned her camp, looking now to finish whatever profit that night's ruin hadn't managed to collect. Rhett rode into the settlement himself the following morning, calm and plain-spoken, and let it be known to anyone who cared to listen that the woman in question was under his protection and on his land, and that any man with further business regarding her would need to take that business up with him. He carried no particular reputation as a dangerous man, and made no show of one that day either, but something in his flat, unhurried certainty apparently carried its own kind of warning, because the stranger rode on within the week, and no further word of him ever reached the ranch again.
Kaia gave little comment about it afterward beyond a quiet private nod of thanks, but Rhett noticed she stood a little closer to him at the fence rail in the evenings that followed and slept, judging by the lamp she left burning lower and later each night a good deal easier than she had in the weeks right after the frost. The first real cold of the season came on a night not long after, frost silvering the porch rail in the garden's last stubborn squash vines by morning, and Kaia stood out in it before sunup, wrapped in a blanket, watching her own breath cloud pale in air gone sharp and clean for the first time since Rhett had known her. She let him know when he came out to find her there that the cold reminded her of home in a way the long dry summer never quite had. That her people read the whole turning year in exactly this kind of mourning and that some part of her had been waiting without fully realizing it for the season to shift before she could let herself properly grieve what the wash had taken. She gave him pieces of it then, careful and measured of the night the raiders came through.
Not the whole raw shape of it, which she kept for herself, the way a person keeps the sharpest parts of any wound, but enough that Rhett understood she had fought and run, and survived on nothing but her own hard will alone before ever reaching those boulders at the wash's edge. She gave it to him, standing straight back in the frost-silvered yard, not as someone reaching for pity, but as someone finally strong enough to hand a piece of her own hardest truth to a man she had decided somewhere along the way was safe enough to hold it. She mentioned too a younger sister, Sula, she called her, a name she hadn't given him before that frost-bright morning, last seen running the opposite direction into a stand of pinion the night the camp scattered. And though Kaia kept her voice level while she gave him the name, Rhett caught the way her hands tightened around the edges of the blanket and understood without needing to be told outright that some nights she lay awake wondering whether that sister had lived to reach the mountains or not. He didn't press her for more than she offered that morning.