"From another person leaving." The kitchen was completely still. "I'm not leaving," Clara said. "I know that now," Mabel said. "That's why I'm saying this."
She finally turned to look at Clara, a direct, unguarded look, the most unguarded Clara had ever seen from her. "You are what you did for Sam, what you did for this ranch, what you did for my father. You are exactly what we needed. And I was too afraid to admit it for too long." Her voice cracked slightly on the last word.
She controlled it immediately. "So, I'm admitting it now." Clara crossed the kitchen and put her arms around the girl. Mabel went rigid for approximately 1 second, the instinctive resistance of someone who has not been held in a long time and has forgotten how, and then she wasn't rigid anymore. She held on.
Clara held on back. They stood like that in the kitchen for a long moment, and neither of them said anything because there wasn't anything left to say that the holding didn't already cover. When Mabel pulled back, her eyes were dry. She would not, Clara thought, cry easily, perhaps not often, perhaps not in front of people. That was simply who she was, and Clara respected it entirely.
"You need to finish the dishes," Mabel said with perfect composure. "Yes," Clara said, "I'm going to check on Sam. All right." Mabel went. Clara turned back to the sink.
She heard, in the other room, Mabel's voice and then Sam's voice, high and clear, saying something emphatic, and then the sound of both of them, something almost like laughter, not quite, but close. She closed her eyes for just a moment. A family does not become smaller when another person loves it, she thought. It becomes larger. She had not said that yet, but she was beginning to feel the truth of it in every room of this house, at every meal, in every small unremarkable moment that was actually not unremarkable at all.
It was 2 weeks after the Hargrove letter that Nate asked her to walk with him. Not to the barn, not to the fields. He'd done both of those things before for practical reasons. This was different. He appeared at the back door after supper while she was still in the kitchen and said, without particular preamble, "Will you walk with me?"
She dried her hands. "Yes," she said. They walked out past the garden, past her herbs, which had taken beautifully, the rosemary and thyme already looking established, and past the barn and the fence line. And into the open land beyond the yard where the evening sky was enormous and the air had the particular quality of September air in Montana, which is cool and clear and smells of things ending and things beginning in equal measure. They walked without talking for a while, then Nate stopped.
She stopped beside him. He looked at the land, his land, the east pasture visible in the distance, secure now, the cattle moving slowly in the evening light. "I need to say something," he said. "All right," she said. "I'm not I'm not a man who says things easily."