Her hands were around her coffee cup.
After a while, she said, "I was ready to decide before I heard that."
"I know," he said.
She looked up at him.
"I'm still going to sleep on it. I'm still going to decide tomorrow morning, not tonight, because making decisions at night is not reliable."
"Not reliable," he agreed.
He ate his stew.
She drank her coffee.
The clock ticked on the wall.
The fire in the stove made its sounds.
Upstairs somewhere, one of the boys dropped something heavy.
There was a muffled exclamation.
Then the sound of two others responding.
Then quiet again.
Clara looked at the ceiling with the expression of a woman who had spent nine years tracking the sounds of her children through the floors of various houses and knew by the particular quality of the silence that followed whether something required her attention or could be left to resolve itself.
She didn't move.
It resolved itself.
She looked back at her coffee.
Gideon finished his stew.
They sat there a while longer in the kitchen that had become the center of the house again, with the fire between them and the Wyoming winter outside.
The deadline was, for the first time in weeks, not the loudest thing in the room.
Clara was up before four.
Gideon knew because he was up before four too, the way he always was.
When he came downstairs, the kitchen fire was already going and her coffee cup was on the table.
She was not in the kitchen.
The back door was unlocked.
He pulled on his coat and went out.
She was standing on the back porch in the dark, wrapped in the heavy wool blanket she kept on the chair by her bedroom door.
Her breath making small clouds in the cold.
The snow from the storm had settled into a deep, quiet cover over everything.
The yard.
The barn roof.
The fence lines.
The mountains at the edge of the dark.
The sky was clear now, the way Wyoming skies went brutally clear after a storm.
The stars were the kind that you only saw this far from any town.
Bright and numerous and completely indifferent to whatever was happening beneath them.
She heard him come out.
She didn't turn around.
"You don't have to stand out here with me," she said.
"I know," he said.
And stood there anyway.
The cold was serious, the kind that got into the spaces between your coat and your collar and reminded you it was there.
Clara pulled the blanket tighter.
Gideon shoved his hands in his coat pockets.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
Which was its own kind of conversation.