The frustration of a boy who had been trying to do an adult's job with adolescent equipment.
"It's not enough."
"It's not nothing," Gideon said.
"It's not enough," Ethan said again.
Not argumentative.
Just precise.
They reached the barn and pushed through the door into the relative quiet.
The storm reduced to a muffled presence outside the walls.
Gideon pulled the door shut.
Both of them stood for a moment, letting the comparative warmth register.
"She's been different this week," Ethan said.
He wasn't looking at Gideon.
He was pulling off his outer gloves with the studied casualness of a boy saying something he'd been holding for a while.
"Quieter. She does that when she's making a decision she doesn't want to tell us about yet."
Gideon didn't answer immediately.
"Like before we left Denver," Ethan said. "She got like that, and then two weeks later she told us we were moving."
The barn was warm with animal heat.
Outside, the storm pressed and howled.
Gideon hung his coat on the peg inside the barn door and looked at this 13-year-old who had been reading his mother's silences since he was 11 and trying to prepare for them.
Carrying the weight of that preparation in a way no child should have to.
"I'm going to talk to her," Gideon said.
Ethan looked at him.
"I should have done it a week ago," Gideon said. "I didn't. That was my mistake."
Ethan held his gaze for a moment with that dark-eyed assessment he'd had since the platform in Cheyenne.
Then he said, "Okay," and went to check on Birch, who was moving restlessly in her stall with the storm noise around her.
Gideon watched him go.
This kid who had appointed himself the early warning system for his family.
Who slept with one ear open and watched people's faces for information.
And had been doing it long enough that he didn't even know it was unusual anymore.
He thought about what Miles had said in the barn weeks ago.
"She's tired. She's been tired a long time."
He went back out into the storm.
The conversation happened that evening, but not the way Gideon had planned it, because he hadn't planned it at all.
He'd learned in the weeks Clara Whitmore had been on his ranch that conversations with her rarely went the way you planned them because she was faster than the plan.
He came in from the last check of the evening, shook the snow from his coat, and found the kitchen empty except for Clara.
She was standing at the stove with a pot of something simmering that she wasn't paying any attention to.
She was just standing there with her hands around a coffee cup, looking at the pot without seeing it.
When the door opened, she turned.
There was a moment, just a second, where her face was unguarded in a way he rarely saw in the daylight.
She put the expression away before he'd had time to fully read it.
"Storm's holding," he said, hanging up his coat.
"I know. I've been watching it."
He came to the stove to pour himself a coffee and found himself standing closer to her than he'd planned.
The kitchen was not a large kitchen.
The stove was in the corner.
And she hadn't moved.
She looked up at him.