Willis came past, a small gray-haired man with the brisk efficiency of someone who had been woken before dawn many times and had expected as part of the bargain, and examined Sam without ceremony, while Clara told him what she'd done and when. He listened, nodded, pressed his fingers to Sam's pulse points, and lifted his eyelids, and checked his throat and neck. "Good management," he said. "The yarrow tea was right. Kept him from going higher."
He looked at Clara over his spectacles. "You know what you're doing." "My mother taught me," she said. "She taught you well." He turned to Nate.
"The fever's breaking. He needs rest and fluids and watching for another 24 hours, but he's going to be fine." Nate did not move for a moment. Then he sat down in the chair that Mabel had vacated. Mabel had woken when the doctor arrived and retreated to the hallway, standing just outside the door, and he put his face in his hands.
It was the only time Clara had seen him come apart even slightly. It was brief, 15 seconds perhaps. His shoulders shook once, and then he pulled his hands down and breathed in and was controlled again. But she had seen it. He looked at her.
"You stayed," he said. "Yes," she said, "all night. Yes." He was quiet for a moment. "Thank you," he said, and this time the weight of what he was thanking her for was entirely clear.
Dr. Willis packed his bag and said he'd check the following day and made his way out, declining breakfast with the good-natured efficiency of a man who had more calls to make. James walked him out. Clara could hear the younger boys beginning to stir in their rooms, the particular sounds of children waking and becoming immediately loud, and she knew the house was about to shift from the held-breath quiet of the night into the complicated noise of morning. She started to get up.
"Clara," Nate said, she stopped. He was still looking at her, and there was something in his face she hadn't seen there before. Not gratitude, exactly. Not quite. Something more complicated, like a door that has been stuck a very long time beginning to move on its hinges.
"I owe you more than a thank you," he said. "You don't owe me anything," she said. "I was" she stopped. "Doing my job felt wrong, not because it wasn't true, but because it was also not all of the truth." "I was here," she said instead.
"That's all." "That's not nothing," he said. "No," she agreed, "it isn't." Mabel appeared in the doorway. "Breakfast," she said.
Her voice was rough with exhaustion and something else. "I'll start it. Sit down," Clara said. Mabel blinked. "I'll start it," Clara said again more gently.