"That's right."
"I need a room. Work in exchange, if you have it."
Reed looked at him—took in the good coat, the good horse, the hands that had not spent a significant portion of their life in physical labor. "For how long?"
"I don't know yet."
Reed was quiet for a moment. Then: "Supper's already done, but there's bread on the board if you need it." He stepped back from the door. "Room's at the top of the stairs. Mind the third step. It's loose."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," Reed said. "Work starts at sunup."
He meant it. The first morning, Nathaniel was up before dawn because Reed knocked on his door before dawn. He was taken to the north fence line—the same fence he would learn later had been Reed's long-running disagreement with Agnes Whitfield—and handed a post driver and shown where the line needed resetting. He had not driven a fence post in his life. He did not say this. He took the post driver and he tried.
He got it wrong twice. Reed watched him get it wrong both times, and then, without comment or condescension, came and showed him the correct angle and the correct grip and the rhythm of it.
"Again," Reed said.
He drove the post. It wasn't good, but it was better.
"Again," Reed said.
By noon, he had driven eleven posts, and his hands were blistered, and he had not complained once because something in Reed's manner made complaint feel irrelevant.
At noon, they ate at a rough table in Reed's kitchen: bread, cold meat, well water. Nothing like the Whitmore breakfast table. The absence of ceremony was so complete that it had its own quality—not lack, but a different kind of sufficiency.
Reed ate without talking. Nathaniel found that this did not bother him the way silence in social situations usually did. It was a different kind of silence: a working silence, the silence of men who have already said with their hands what needed saying.
"You're the husband," Reed said finally. It wasn't a question.
"Yes," Nathaniel said.
Reed nodded once. He drank his water. "She's doing good work up here," he said. "Those kids she's teaching. Agnes' farm. The Carney family. People have noticed."
"I know."
"Did you know before?"
It was a simple question, entirely without accusation. That made it harder to deflect.
"No," Nathaniel said. "Not the way I should have."
Reed looked at him—the assessing look of a man who takes stock. "Why not?"
Nathaniel thought about this. Not the rehearsed answer, the version of the story he'd been preparing where he came out as a man with comprehensible failures, a man who had erred and recognized it. The honest answer.
"Because I was looking at what she didn't have," he said, "instead of what she was."
Reed was quiet.
"I told myself I was being practical," Nathaniel said. "I told myself I was a man who understood value clearly. I had a very organized notion of what value looked like. She didn't fit that notion, and I... I never adjusted the notion. I adjusted my expectations of her instead."
Reed picked up his bread. "Man gets very good at measuring things his own way," he said. "Stops noticing that the measuring stick is the problem."
"Yes."
"Ain't easy to pick up a different one."
"No."
Reed looked at him steadily. "She know you're staying a while?"
"She told me to come to you."
Something in Reed's expression shifted—small, nearly invisible, but it was there: the expression of a man who has been handed information he considers significant. "She send you here specifically?"
"Yes."
Reed set his bread down. He looked at his water glass. Then he looked at Nathaniel again. "She doesn't do things without reasons," he said. "Thought you should know that."
Nathaniel held that. He turned it over. "I know," he said.
The afternoon work was harder than the morning. Reed had him clearing a section of stone wall that had collapsed at the eastern corner, sorting the stones by size for reuse. It was not skilled work, but it required attention: the wrong stone placed wrong would mean the wall would need doing again in a season. Reed showed him once what he was looking for; he didn't show him twice.
The sun was well down when they finished. Nathaniel's back ached in places he hadn't known could ache. His hands were worse than they'd been at noon. He didn't say any of this.