He stopped waking from nightmares. He started waking early instead, tumbling downstairs to help Eleanor with the morning bread flour on his nose, chattering about everything and nothing, and Eleanor treasured every ordinary word of it. Clara grew up straight and strong and unafraid. The girl who had once carried the weight of being the little mother of the house set that weight down at last and let herself be a child, and then in time let herself become something better than the grim, watchful creature grief had made of her. She grew fierce and funny and kind, quick to defend anyone she saw being treated unfairly, and Eleanor knew exactly where that came from, and never told her because some inheritances are best left unspoken.
One evening late in the summer, Clara found Eleanor on the porch and sat down beside her. Nearly grown now tall for her age and was quiet for a while in the way of a person working up to something. I want to ask you something, she said finally. And I want you to tell me the truth, even if it's a hard one. Always, Eleanor said.
That first day in town when Papa found you in the snow, Clara pulled her knees up. If you'd known then everything that would happen, Whitaker, the hearing all of it, how hard it would be, would you still have gotten in the wagon? Eleanor didn't answer right away. She looked out at the land at the creek running silver in the distance, at the lamp glowing warm behind them in the window of a house that had once held nothing but grief. "When your father found me," she said slowly, I had decided my life was over.
Not that I wanted to die, just that I didn't see any way forward. Everyone I'd trusted had thrown me away. I was sitting in that snow thinking that a person could go from being someone's whole world to being nothing at all in the space of a few weeks and that maybe that was all I was ever going to be. Nothing. She turned to look at the girl who had once refused to call her mother.
And then your father crouched down in the mud in front of me and offered me a job. And a week later, a girl told me to my face I'd never be her mother. A soft smile. And that same girl 3 weeks after that stood on this very porch and told a rich woman from Cheyenne that I was worth fighting for. Clara's eyes went bright.
"So, you're asking me if I do it all again?" Eleanor said, knowing how hard it was knowing about Whitaker and the hearing and Boston reaching across the whole country to hurt me one more time. She reached over and took the girl's hand. Clara, I would do it a thousand times. I would walk through a thousand winters and sit in a thousand snowbanks if the wagon at the end of them had you in it.
Because everything they took from me in Boston, everything they said I'd never be worth having, I found it here. I found it in you and in your brother and in your father. They threw me away like I was nothing. And I turned out to be the luckiest woman in the whole territory because being thrown away is what brought me home. Clara didn't say anything.
She just leaned over and put her head on Eleanor's shoulder the way she had that first terrible night when Henry's fever broke. And the two of them sat together in the gathering dark and there was no distance left between them at all. Nathaniel found them like that when he came up from the barn and he stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and just looked at them a long moment, the same way he had that first day when he'd found the three of them tangled together on the same porch and stopped afraid to disturb it. You know, he said quietly, coming up the steps. When I first met you, I thought you needed me to save you.