Scout, he corrected finally. The Army paid me to track people. Sometimes kill them. Then they stopped paying. Her expression didn't change.
You killed Apache. Elias looked at her now. Not defensive, just tired. Sometimes not by choice. Orders.
The air thickened. She didn't move or speak, just stared at the fire until it snapped loud enough to make her blink. He expected her to walk out, maybe vanish the way she'd come. Instead, she said, "Then maybe we both did things we wish we hadn't. He studied her face.
Try to read the meaning behind her words. There was pain there, yes, but no hatred. It confused him. You ran from something," he said finally. "What happened?"
She hesitated, then spoke slowly as if testing whether she could still trust her own voice. My village burned two summers ago. Cavalry came, said it was orders, too. I was taken to the reservation. I left when my brother died there.
No one stopped me. There was no one left to stop me. Elias looked away. He had no words for that. Only the weight of shame pressing behind his ribs.
He wanted to say he was sorry, but it sounded too small for what she'd lost. She poured more coffee, her hands steady. "You think I came here because I was lost," she said. "I came because I didn't want to die alone." "The word stayed with him the rest of the day."
He worked outside longer than usual, mending the fence again, chopping wood until the sweat blurred his vision. The truth was, he understood her better than he wanted to admit. He too had walked away from the world, convinced solitude was safer than trust. Now her presence forced him to look at the man he'd become. That evening, when the sun dropped behind the canyon, they shared dinner again.
Beans, bread, and a slice of dried venison. Naira ate slowly, her gaze distant. Elias noticed the scar on her wrist more clearly this time. A thin line of old pain. "You got that from a fire?"
he asked. She shook her head. "From a rope." He didn't push further. Some things didn't need explaining, but he remembered the way she had said alone is safer and realized it wasn't fear that drove her.
It was exhaustion. Later that night, lightning flickered far off in the mountains, and thunder rolled low across the valley. Naira stood by the door, tense, her breathing shallow. Elias saw it, the stiffness in her shoulders, the way her fingers dug into her blanket. Without a word, he moved to the stove, threw another log in, and sat nearby.