I mean, every word. Most people would use whatever they had. I'm not most people, Eleanor met his eyes. And I'd sooner lose the hearing honest than win it by turning your daughter into a weapon. Nathaniel reached across the table then and covered her hand with his.
And this time neither of them pulled away or pretended it was nothing. "When my first wife died," he said quietly, and Eleanor went still, because in a month he had never once spoken of her. "I stopped believing anything good could last. Figured the world took what it wanted and left you with the scraps, and the smart thing was to stop wanting anything at all so it couldn't be taken." That's how I raised my children for 3 years.
Braced, waiting for the next loss. He turned her hand over in his, tracing the callous that a month of work had already begun to raise on her palm. And then I found a woman half frozen outside a church more stubborn than any mule I ever owned. And somehow inside a month, my son's laughing again and my daughters crying like a child instead of carrying the weight of a grown woman. And I He stopped.
"I don't know what to do with hope, Eleanor. I forgot how it works." Eleanor's throat had gone tight. "You hold on to it," she said. Same as anything worth keeping.
You hold on even when it's frightening. Especially when it's frightening. "Is that what you're doing? Holding on?" She considered lying.
It would have been easier. But she had promised herself the day her husband's family threw her out that she would never again make herself small. To make someone else comfortable. And that promise extended to the truth of her own heart. "I don't know what I'm doing," she admitted.
"A month ago, I'd buried a husband and lost everything I owned. And I swore I'd never let anyone close enough to hurt me again. And now I've got a child asleep upstairs who begged me not to leave. And I've got you looking at me like like I'm somebody worth looking at. And I don't know what to do with any of it.
I only know that when Clara pressed her face into my shoulder tonight and asked me to stay, I'd have fought the entire county to make it so. And I don't think a woman who feels that is the kind of woman Charles Whitaker's claiming I am." Nathaniel didn't say anything. He only lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to her knuckles, brief and rough and certain. And it wasn't romance exactly.