Mara stepped across the row and took June's hands in hers. Her palms were callused and warm, and the saw scar was a pale line against the dirt. "I see you," she said. "You are not extra. You have never been extra. This homestead does not stand without you. I do not stand without you. If Elias stays here, he stays in a house that is yours as much as mine, and if that is not something you can bear, then he does not stay. I mean that, June. I will not trade my sister for a man, not even this man."
June's eyes filled, and she laughed, a wet, surprised sound. "You would choose me over him?"
I choose you first, Mara said. "I have always chosen you first. That does not mean I do not want him. It means I will not have him at your cost."
The fight, if it could be called a fight, did not end with shouting or with a door slammed. It ended the way the sisters had always mended things: together, by hand. June picked up the bucket. Mara picked up the weeds June had pulled too hard and sorted the good stems from the ruined ones without comment. They worked down the row side by side, and after a while June began to talk again, about the mare, about the fence post that still leaned, about the way Elias held a hammer as if he had been born with one in his hand, and Mara listened, and answered, and did not pretend that any of it was simple.
By noon the garden was weeded and the bread was out of the oven, and June, setting the table, said, "I need to hear it from him, too. Not from you, telling me what he feels. From him. I need him to look at me and say it plain, whatever it is."
Mara nodded. "Then you shall have that. And whatever he says, June, you and I will still be sitting at this table tomorrow."
That night, when the lamp was low and the door was barred and Elias lay on his pallet between their pallets and the door, June lay awake a long time listening to him breathe, and to Mara breathe, and to the wind moving in the pines outside. The pallet felt different than it had in the first nights, just as Mara had said it would. It felt chosen. And June understood, lying there in the dark, that chosen things could still hurt, and that hurt did not have to break anything if you said it aloud and let the other person hold it with you. She fell asleep at last to the sound of the creek and the creak of the cabin settling, and in the morning she woke with the ache still there, smaller and cleaner, like a bruise that had begun to heal.
Elias found June at the corral in the late morning, working with the nervous mare she had been gentling since the fence work began. The mare was a chestnut with a white star and a habit of shying at her own shadow, and June stood at her shoulder with a soft voice and a steady hand, asking nothing, offering a carrot, waiting. Elias watched from the fence for a while, the way he watched before he spoke, and when June looked up and saw him she did not startle. She had known he would come. Mara had told her, over breakfast, that she had said June should have the plain truth from him, and Elias had agreed without hesitation, which was itself a kind of answer.
I'll walk with you a bit, Elias said, "if you'll have me."
June nodded and handed him the lead rope, and they walked the mare out along the creek pasture where the grass was tall and the willows threw a moving shade over the water. Willow Creek ran shallow and cold over smooth stones, and the air smelled of water and crushed grass and horse sweat. For a time neither of them spoke, and Elias was glad of it, because he wanted to get this right, and getting it right meant not rushing past the hard part to make himself comfortable.
At last June stopped beneath a willow and turned to face him. Her light brown hair had come loose from its braid and freckles stood out across her nose in the sun. She looked younger than her twenty-four years in that moment, and older, too, both at once. "You know why I'm asking," she said.
I do, Elias said.
Then say it, she said, not unkindly. "Don't dress it up. I can bear plain better than kind lies."
Elias took off his hat and held it in his hands. The scar through his left eyebrow caught the light. He looked at June directly, the way he had looked at Mara when he made his promise on the fence line, and he spoke slowly, choosing each word as if it were a rail he was setting straight.
June, he said, "you were the first to laugh with me in this house. You were the first to tell me a hard truth to my face, at the creek at dawn, when I needed to hear it and did not want to. I will not forget that, and I will not pretend it meant nothing, because it meant a great deal. You carried my story back to your sister when I could not carry it myself, and that was a kindness I have not had in ten years."