"Nathan." She looked at him directly. "I cannot take charity. I can take help if it comes with reasonable terms I can eventually meet. But I will not be the woman who lets a stranger pay her legal bills and her ranch debts, and calls it anything other than what it is."
He met her eyes without flinching. "Fair enough. We'll put it on paper if that's what makes it clean. A loan, repayable against the first profitable cattle season after you win the land. Terms to be negotiated with Hart present."
"Interest?"
"None."
"That's not a loan. That's a gift."
"Then one percent," he said, and there was that ghost of a smile again, the one that appeared and disappeared so quickly she was never quite sure she'd seen it. "Which is an insult to actual lenders everywhere. But it makes it a legal contract and not a favor. And maybe that sits better with you."
She considered it. It did sit better—not because the percentage mattered, but because the structure of it gave her ground to stand on: a clear obligation with clear terms, not something she owed because a stranger pitied her.
"One percent," she said.
"Agreed." He nodded. They didn't shake on it; they didn't need to.
As she was washing up the cups, he said from the table, "Tell me about your son."
She kept her hands in the washbasin. She hadn't talked about Thomas to anyone since the last letter she'd received from him in July. Not because she didn't think about him constantly—she did, every day, the way a person presses on a bruise—but because Thomas was the part of all this that she kept strictly separated from everything else. Thomas was what she was fighting for; he didn't get to become part of the fight.