He waited.
"The boys are going to need schooling," she said. "Milfield has the school, and Eleanor Harmon says the teacher is good, and it's a reasonable ride in fair weather. We'll need a schedule for that."
She was into her list mode, which he'd learned to read as the mode she used when she'd already made a bigger decision and was now dealing with the logistics of it.
The practical scaffolding that let the bigger decision stand.
"And I want to plant a real kitchen garden this spring, not just the herb patch. If we're going to feed this many people properly through next winter, we need more than what's been getting ordered."
"All right," he said.
"And Ethan..."
She paused.
"Ethan needs to be learning things that matter to him, not just things that are useful. He's been working this ranch like a hand since November. That's good. But he's 13 and he's smart, and I don't want him to disappear into the work and stop growing in other directions."
"He's been reading the almanac with Caleb," Gideon said.
She blinked.
"Has he?"
"Weather patterns. Land management. Crop yields. Caleb got him into it about three weeks ago. I found them arguing about soil drainage over breakfast last Tuesday."
Clara looked at the table for a moment with an expression he'd come to recognize.
The one that appeared when something surprised her into feeling something she hadn't budgeted for.
"He didn't tell me that," she said.
"Boys don't always tell their mothers everything."
Gideon said it not as a complaint.
Just as how it worked.
She looked at him.
"Is that how you were?"
"I was worse," he said. "My mother found out I'd broken my wrist in a fall six weeks after it happened."
"Gideon."
"It healed fine."
"Mostly."
She pressed her lips together in the way she did when she was trying not to laugh at something she'd decided not to reward with a laugh.
He'd learned that expression too.
He was building a working vocabulary of her expressions the way you learned a language.
Slowly at first.
Then all at once.
"About the spring," she said, getting back to it. "I also want to talk about..."
She stopped.
"About what this looks like. You and I. What we're..."
She paused.
"I don't want it to be undefined indefinitely. Not because I need a ceremony or... I'm not asking for that right now. I'm saying I don't want to spend the next year calling myself the housekeeper and having no one know what that means."
Gideon looked at her steadily.
"What do you want to call yourself?"
"I don't know yet," she said. "But I want to figure it out with you, not have it just drift into something neither of us chose."
"That's fair," he said.
"I'm serious."
"I know you're serious. I'm agreeing with you."
He looked at her.
"I'm not interested in drifting either. I'm interested in you. Whatever that looks like worked out properly over time."
She held his gaze for a moment.
The kitchen fire.
The clock.
The sound of Miles moving around somewhere above them.