She nodded once. She stood and started clearing the table—the ordinary, small motions of a day ending. And Nathan stood too, and brought his cup to the basin, and they moved around each other in the kitchen the way people do when they've learned the geometry of sharing space: neither of them making anything of it, both of them aware of it entirely.
"Nathan," she said, her back to him, washing a cup in the basin.
"Yes?"
"When this is over..." She started again. "When the hearing is done, and the land is settled, and Hart goes back to Laramie, and Thomas goes back to school..." She paused. "What do you do then?"
The question she hadn't been able to not ask, finally out in the open.
The silence lasted long enough that she turned around. He was looking at her with that direct, undisguised attention, the one he no longer bothered to moderate.
"That depends," he said, "on what there is to stay for."
She looked at him. He looked at her. The lamp threw long shadows across the kitchen, and somewhere outside the wind moved through the tall grass, and the Wyoming night was enormous around the small, lit window of her house.
"I'll think about that," she said.
"Take your time," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."
She turned back to the basin. She finished washing the cups. She heard him go out the back door and across the yard to the bunkhouse. She stood at the basin a while longer than was necessary, her hands still in the cooling water, and thought about what it meant when a man who had spent twenty years with no fixed address said, "I'm not going anywhere," and meant it the way Nathan Cole meant things: simply, directly, without theater, the way a man states a fact about the landscape.