"That's not an offer, Nathaniel. That's a threat." I know it. He's telling you that if you don't sell, he'll come after the marriage itself. I know that, too.
Nathaniel took the letter back and dropped it in the fire, watching it curl and blacken. "Question is, what do we do about it?" Eleanor noticed the word before he did. We, not I. She turned it over in her mind the way she'd turned the letter, checking it for weight, and found that it held.
"We don't do anything yet," she said. A threat's only powerful if you flinch. We go on like nothing's changed. We give him nothing to point at. And when he makes his move, we're ready for it.
Nathaniel looked at her across the fire, and something in his face shifted some reassessment happening behind his eyes. "You've done this before." "I've had men with fine paper try to ruin me before," Eleanor said. The difference is last time I was alone. She hadn't meant to say it.
It came out before she could catch it, and it hung there in the warm kitchen air between them, more honest than she'd intended. Nathaniel didn't answer it directly. He only nodded once and stood and squeezed her shoulder as he passed on his way to the barn. And Eleanor sat there for a long while after he'd gone, wondering when exactly alone had stopped feeling like the truest word she knew. The trouble with Charles Whitaker was that he did not come at them directly.
He was too clever for that and too patient. Instead, the cold began to creep in from the edges. First, it was the general store. Eleanor rode into Cedar Hollow the following week for flour and thread and salt coins counted careful in her pocket, and Mr. Aldridge, who owned the store, met her at the counter with an apology already forming on his face. ""I'm sorry, Mrs.
Carter," he said, and the name still felt new enough in her ears to catch her off guard. I can't extend the Carter account any further. Cash only from here forward. The Carter account has never once been late, Eleanor said. Nathaniel's told me himself.
30 years his family's shopped here. I know it. I know. Aldridge wouldn't quite meet her eyes. But times are hard, and I've got to protect my own interests.