"That I needed to think about it. He's giving me until Monday."
"That's a real thing," I say. "You should think about it."
She's quiet for a moment. "That's all you're going to say?"
"It's your decision."
"I know it's my decision." Not sharp, but present. "I'm telling you, not asking permission."
"I know."
"Then you could say something."
I look up at her. She's standing in my garden with dirt on her forearms and her hair in a knot and the afternoon sun cutting across her face, and she's watching me with those eyes that don't miss anything, and I feel the full weight of what I'm about to do and I do it anyway.
"What do you want me to say?" I ask.
She tries and fails to hide the flash of emotion on her face. She puts the phone in her pocket. "Never mind," she says. "I'm going to check on the rabbit."
I watch her walk toward the barn. Then I go back to the peppers, and I work the rest of the bed in silence, and I stay there until the light shifts.
The pullback is quiet and deliberate.
From the inside it feels like self-preservation. I know how it looks from the outside.
Sloane is sharp enough to notice within the hour. I can tell by how she goes slightly more careful herself, a degree of extra intention in how she moves around me, like she's decided not to push on something that might give way unexpectedly. She doesn't ask. She has the instinct to ask everything, but she knows when not to, and she's choosing not to now, and somehow that makes it worse.
We work through the afternoon in a silence that is different from our usual silence. Our usual silence is easy, full of the sound of the farm. This one has something in it.
At some point Burl comes off the porch to find her. The old dog makes the slow walk across the yard on his bad hips to wherever she is, and sits, and she accommodates him without breaking what she's doing. Today she's sorting the bean harvest on the porch steps and he comes and stands at the bottom, looking up, and I watch her set down the beans and come down two steps to his level so he doesn't have to try the stairs.
She sits beside him. She puts her hand near his face and he stretches his chin toward it the way he does, the full slow reach of his old neck, and rests it against her palm.
She came back to the farm for a rabbit and somewhere along the way she started loving this old dog and my bees and thechickens and the way the borage looks in the evening light, and I know this because I have been paying attention with my whole self for three weeks and I have not missed a single thing.
That's the problem. Watching her with Burl is the thing that makes the wall I'm building feel both necessary and wrong, and I can't tell anymore which feeling to trust.
She stays for dinner. The kitchen is quiet. She sets the table without asking where things are because she knows, and I put food down and we eat, and the silence at the table has the same particular weight as the silence in the garden.
Halfway through she puts her fork down and looks at me.
"You're doing a thing," she says.
"What thing?"
"A thing where you go somewhere I can't follow." She says it plainly, no accusation in it. "You've been there since the phone call."
I look at my plate. "I'm right here."
"You're really not."
She's not wrong. She's also too perceptive to sit across from when you're trying to manage something, and I've known this about her since I met her but I keep forgetting it at crucial moments.
"There's a good job in Vancouver," I say. "That's real. Whatever you decide, I'm not going to stand in the way of it."
"I didn't ask you to stand in the way of it."
"I know."
