But a real laugh.
Sudden and unguarded.
The kind a boy produced when he forgot for a moment to be careful.
He caught himself almost immediately.
Looked over at Gideon with the beginning of self-consciousness.
Gideon kept his face easy.
"She likes you," he said.
"She doesn't like most people."
"She almost knocked me over," Ethan said.
But the laugh was still somewhere in his voice.
"That's how she shows affection. Pushes you around. Means she trusts you."
He looked at the mare.
"Takes her a long time to trust."
Ethan was quiet.
He stroked Birch's nose, and she submitted to it with an expression of absolute indifference.
That was the horse equivalent of contentment.
"Can I ride her sometime?" Ethan asked.
"When the weather breaks," Gideon said. "She needs the snow to thin out first or she gets unpredictable on the ice."
"Okay."
Then, after a pause:
"That's something to look forward to."
He said it simply.
Factually.
With no particular weight.
But Gideon heard it.
He heard the thing underneath it.
The fact that Ethan had said "to look forward to," as though there was a forward in which he assumed he would still be here.
Still on this ranch.
Still working alongside Gideon on fence lines.
And eventually learning to ride a difficult mare in the spring.
He'd said it the way someone said something about their own home.
Gideon rode back to the ranch with a 13-year-old boy who had laughed once and said something about spring.
And he understood by the time they pulled up to the barn that he couldn't keep the letter in his bedside drawer any longer.
He told her that night.
Clara was in the kitchen.
The boys long in bed.
The ranch hands in the bunkhouse.
She was darning one of Noah's socks.
The kid destroyed socks at a rate that defied any practical explanation.
Gideon came in from his study and set the envelope on the table in front of her without preamble.
She looked at it.
Then at him.
Then she picked it up.
He watched her read it.
He watched her face do the things faces did when someone was trying to keep them from doing anything.
The stillness.
The slight tension at the jaw.