Eleanor's spine straightened. Whatever softness had crept into her chest hardened right back up. "I'm not looking for charity, Mr. Carter. And I'm certainly not looking to be some man's housekeeper out of pity."
"Wasn't offering pity." His voice sharpened just slightly enough that she understood she'd insulted him. I'm offering a job because I need the work done and you look like a woman who knows how to work. If you'd rather freeze out here on principal, that's your business. But I've got a house full of chores and a boy who hasn't eaten a hot meal cooked by anybody but me in two years.
And frankly, ma'am, my biscuits could double as roofing shingles. Henry made a small sound that might have been a laugh quickly buried. Eleanor looked at the boy, then really looked at him, and something in his thin face and hollow eyes reminded her so sharply of her own reflection these past weeks that her throat closed up entirely. "I don't know you," she said quietly. "I don't know your family.
I buried a husband 3 weeks ago and I don't have the strength left in me to trust another stranger's kindness. The last time I trusted people who claimed to want to help me, they took everything I owned and put me on a train heading nowhere. "Then don't trust me," Nathaniel said. "Trust the wage. Trust the roof.
The rest you can decide on your own time." She wanted to say no. Every instinct honed by three weeks of humiliation told her to say no to protect whatever fragile dignity she had left by refusing to be anyone's charity case, anyone's convenient solution. But the sun was dropping fast behind the mountains, and Mrs. Puit's boarding house had already turned her away once, and the coins in her coat pocket wouldn't buy her a week's lodging, even if someone would take them.
"One week," she said finally. I'll work one week and if it doesn't suit either of us, I'll find my own way from there. Nathaniel nodded like that was more than fair. He reached for her suitcase before she could stop him hefting it like it weighed nothing, though Eleanor knew for a fact it held three years of a life packed down to almost nothing. Clara still hadn't said a single word.
The ride out to the Carter Ranch took the better part of an hour. The wagon creaking under a tarp that did little against the snow. Eleanor sat wedged between her suitcase and the wagon side rail, watching the town disappear behind them, swallowed up by white in a matter of minutes, like it had never existed at all. Henry sat across from her wrapped in a blanket that smelled of horse and wood smoke, his eyes never quite leaving her face. Every time Eleanor looked at him, he glanced away, then looked back the moment she wasn't watching.
"You can look at me if you like," she said softly. "I don't bite." Henry considered this with the seriousness only a six-year-old could summon. "Clara says you won't stay." Eleanor's chest tightened.
"Does she now?" "She says the last one didn't stay either. Miss Hartley." She came to help with the cooking and she left after 2 months because Clara put a snake in her sewing basket. Despite everything, Eleanor felt her mouth twitch.