She'd spent two years learning how to stand without him. She was not going to become the kind of woman who leaned on the first man who showed her a shred of decency. She stepped forward before Silas could say anything else. "I thank you for your position," she said to him. And she meant it.
And she hoped he could hear that she meant it. "But I need you to stand back." Silas looked at her. "Ma'am, I didn't come here because I needed another man to fight for me." Martha said, "I've got enough of that in my history already. I came here to work and to earn my keep and to stand on my own two feet." She turned back to the writer. You tell Mr.
Crane that I have documentation for every tool in that chest. You tell him I kept receipts because I'm a woman who worked for a man who lied and I knew someday I'd need them. And you tell him that if he sends anyone to this property again to demand what's mine, I will take my documentation to the county clerk's office and let them sort out whose name is on those purchase records. The rider looked between her and Silas one more time. Then he wheeled his horse and went back through the gate.
Martha watched him go until the road was empty. Then she picked up her coffee cup. "I'll start breakfast," she said. She had taken two steps toward the door when Silas spoke. "Mrs.
Whitaker." She stopped. She turned. He was still standing where she'd left him, looking at her with an expression she hadn't seen on his face before and couldn't quite categorize. It wasn't dismissal. It wasn't the startled confusion of a man who'd found a fat widow under his wagon.
It was something more careful than either of those things. "What are you afraid is going to happen?" He asked. "If you let somebody help you," the question landed somewhere in the center of her chest, and she felt it the way you feel something that's true. She looked at him for a long moment. "I'm not afraid of help," she said finally.
"I'm afraid of disappearing into it," she held his gaze. There's a difference. Silas didn't say anything. Martha went inside and started breakfast. She made biscuits from the flour she found in his badly organized larder.
She found a side of salt pork that had been hung properly and was still good, and she cut thick slices and got them going in the iron pan she located hanging on the wrong hook entirely. While the pork cooked, she scrambled eggs, found the last of what turned out to be a very sad collection of winter stores, and did what she could with them. And when she finally put plates on the rough huneed table, and called through the door, Silas came in and sat down without ceremony, and they ate in silence that was not uncomfortable. He ate the way men ate when they'd been feeding themselves badly for too long. Not fast exactly, but with a particular focus of someone who had forgotten that food could be more than fuel.