She took his small hand in her large one. "I don't know if what we're doing here will work," she said. "I don't know if two broken people can build something whole. But I know that carrying shame alone is killing you the same way being too big to love was killing me." "Maybe we can't fix each other.
Maybe that's not even the point. But maybe we can at least share the weight." Silas looked at their joined hands, his rough and small, hers broad and strong, different in every way except that they were both scarred by work and marked by survival. I don't know how to stop feeling guilty, he admitted. Then don't stop, Norah replied.
Not yet. Just make room for something else alongside it. Room for the fact that you're still here, still trying, still decent enough to build a chair for a woman you barely know because you noticed she had nowhere to sit. That counts for something, Silas. It has to.
They sat like that until the moon rose. Two people trading truths in the darkness, testing whether honesty could be a foundation for something more solid than the lies they'd told in letters. When they finally went inside, neither of them mentioned that they'd held hands, or that some boundary between strangers and something else had been crossed, or that the cabin felt somehow less empty than it had the night before. The next morning, dawned with trouble. Silas woke to pounding on his door and angry voices.
He stumbled out of his bed roll, still half asleep, to find three of his neighbors standing on his porch with the particular expressions men wear when they've come to deliver bad news and enjoy it. Boon, said Tom Hutchkins, no relation to Norah despite the shared name, a rancher who owned the spread two miles north. He was a thick man with a thick mustache, and the kind of confidence that came from being right-sized for the world. Your bulls out tore through my fence last night and scattered my herd halfway to Sunday. That's impossible, Silas said, trying to shake off sleep.
Thunder secure in the pasture. I checked before it. Don't care what you checked, Tom interrupted. I'm telling you, your damn bull is on my property causing havoc, and you're coming to get him before I shoot him and bill you for the meat." Silas was pulling on his boots when Norah emerged from the sleeping alcove, her hair loose and her dress hastily buttoned.
The three men stopped talking immediately, staring at her with expressions ranging from shock to poorly disguised amusement. "Lord Almighty," breathed Pete Morrison, the youngest of the three. "The stories weren't exaggerating." Shut your mouth, Pete," Tom said, but his eyes were on Norah, too, assessing, judging. "Mrs. Boon, I presume."
"Miss Hutchkins," Norah corrected coolly. "We haven't formalized the marriage yet." "And you are?" "Tom Hutchkins, your neighbor to the north. These are Pete Morrison and Frank Chen.
We've come about Boon's Bull." "I heard." Norah said, "I'll come with you." "That's not Tom started. I said I'll come with you, Norah repeated, and there was something in her voice that ended the discussion.