Autumn Sky was quiet a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had gone softer, carrying its own old weight. My mother died when I was young. Not raiders, not soldiers. Fever same as near, took me these past days.
My father doesn't speak of her either. Not if he can help it. I used to think that meant he'd stopped loving her. Took me years to understand it meant the opposite. Some grief doesn't get smaller with time.
Wade Callaway. It just gets quieter because a man learns he has to keep living around it one way or another. That's supposed to make me feel better. Wasn't trying to make you feel better. Was trying to make you feel less alone in it.
Different thing. Wade looked at her a long moment in the lamplight. You're better at this than you let on. I contain multitudes, she said entirely deadpan, and it startled a laugh out of him he didn't see coming. rough and unpracticed. The kind of laugh a man forgets he still has in him until it shows up uninvited.
You believe this man killed your wife? She said once the laugh had faded, her voice gone careful again. Not a question, a quiet considered confirmation. I believe somebody wanted it to look like an Apache raid. I believe I let myself believe the easy version because the hard version was more than I could carry at the time.
Wade's voice cracked just slightly on the last of it. five years, Autumn Sky. five years. I hated your whole people for something. I never once properly checked. And now, now I don't know what I hate anymore. Just know it isn't you.
Isn't your father? Isn't anybody sitting around that fire tonight? She reached out slow and put her hand over his. The first time either of them had touched like that. Deliberate, unhurried. meaning something neither one of them was ready yet to say out loud.
"Hate's heavy," she said. "Heavier than grief most days, because grief, at least tells you the truth about what you lost. Hate just tells you who to blame, whether it's true or not. Sounds to me like you've been carrying the wrong weight a long while." Wade Callaway feels that way, he admitted.
Then put it down. Not all at once. Nobody expects that. But start. Wade looked at her hand over his, small and steady, and for the first time since the morning, he'd found Sarah's shawl on that fence post, felt something in his chest loosen that had been clenched so long he'd forgotten it could do anything else.
He didn't sleep easy that night. Even so, somewhere past midnight, the old dream found him again. The one that had visited maybe a hundred times over five years, and never once gotten any gentler with repetition smoke, and a blue shawl on a fence post, and his own voice calling a name that never once got an answer back. He woke gasping half out of the chair before he even knew he was moving. Autumn Sky was awake, too, watching him from the cot, quiet, not making a thing of it.