He drinks too much and owes me a horse. So, no, Elias said with a hint of dry humor that caught her by surprise. She almost smiled, but it faded quickly. Inside, she boiled water for coffee. He joined her a few minutes later, boots heavy with mud.
As they sat, the silence between them began to shift again, less guarded, but still full of questions neither knew how to ask. She broke at first. "You were a soldier," she said quietly, eyes fixed on the table. "I saw the photograph. He didn't answer right away, his fingers tightened around the tin cup. " Scout, he corrected finally.
Army pay 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 hand 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.