I'm not going to be good at it. But I'm going to try." "I know," she said. "And I'm going to keep telling you the true thing, even when it's hard. I'm not going to be easy about that."
"I know," he said. They stood in the September evening holding hands in the middle of everything that had led to this moment, the advertisement and the train and two worn bags and Sam's fever and Hargrove's greed and Mabel's walls coming down and Ethan's sketches and Luke's engineering book and the herb garden and the kitchen that had slowly become a hearth again, all of it. Underneath them, underneath this moment, the ground it stood on. "We should go back," he said. "The children will want supper."
"They've had supper," she said. "They'll want to know what's happened," he said. "Sam already knows," she said. "He decided this 3 months ago." Nate looked at her.
"He told me I was his," she said. "His words. Lord help us." Nate said with something that was fully, finally, completely a smile. "Indeed," she said.
They walked back to the house together, and the light was going golden across everything. And through the kitchen window, she could see the lamp already lit, and the shapes of children moving around inside. And she thought that this this exact thing this ordinary beautiful thing was what she had not let herself hope for when she got on the train in Billings with two worn bags and nothing certain ahead. She thought about Robert. She thought about him honestly, without guilt, because she had learned that loving someone new did not require diminishing someone already loved, that grief and hope were not enemies.
That you could carry the dead with tenderness, and still walk forward into the living. She thought he would have liked Nate. She thought Eleanor might have liked her. She thought Sam would have liked both of them because Sam liked everyone, immediately and without reservation, and the world was a significantly better place for it. Nate held the back door open for her.
She stepped into the kitchen. Seven voices all at different pitches, all speaking at once, the extraordinary noise of a living family rose around her. She was home. They told the children the next morning. Not at supper the night before, though Mabel had looked at both of them when they came back through the kitchen door and had said nothing.
Which said everything. She had simply gone back to what she was doing with the particular composure of someone whose theory has been confirmed and who is not going to make a performance of being right about it. Sam had looked up from the table and studied their faces with the forensic attention he brought to most things and then returned to his biscuit satisfied. As though the matter had been settled in a court he alone presided over and the verdict was exactly what he'd expected. It was the morning that Nate called them all together.
He did it the way he did most things simply without ceremony without building to it. He came into the kitchen where most of them were already gathered for breakfast and he stood at the head of the table and waited until the noise that settled. Which took approximately 30 seconds because his children had learned over 17 years that when Nate Holloway stood at the head of the table and waited you settled. Clara has agreed to marry me he said a beat of silence. Then Thomas said finally Daniel said James owes me a dollar.