It concerns me because it could hurt you, not because it hurts me. She looked at him. That's either very noble or very naive, she said. Could be both, he said. And despite herself, despite every sensible, practical, self-preserving instinct, she had developed over 26 years of learning exactly how the world worked.
Amelia Whitaker laughed. It surprised at them both. She couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed like that, sudden and real and unmanaged. She brought her hand up quickly to cover it the old reflex, but it was too late and he was already looking at her with something in his face. She didn't have a word for something that was warm and startled and entirely serious all at once.
"You should do that more often," he said quietly. She took her hand down. "You should say funnier things," she said. He smiled. "A real one, the kind that changed his whole face.
I'll work on it," he said. The summer deepened. The gossip, as Amelia had predicted, deepened with it. She heard it in fragments. The way you always hear gossip when you're its subject.
A conversation that stops when you enter the room. A look exchanged across a table. A remark delivered just loud enough to reach you from the next table at the general store. She heard that she was scheming. She heard that she had bewitched him somehow, which struck her as both insulting and vaguely flattering.
She heard that he would come to his senses soon. She heard that someone should speak to him to remind him of his obligations, his family name, the order of things. She kept her head down. She did her work. She was polite to everyone, even the ones who were not polite to her.
And on Tuesday mornings, she sat on the steps of Caldwell's boarding house and waited to hear the sound of a horse coming down the road. And she thought about what Nathaniel had said. I don't feel like I'm performing anything when I talk to you. She turned those words over like the smooth stone she'd found by the creek months ago. The one she kept in her apron pocket without quite knowing why.
Cool in the summer heat, solid, real. She was not, she told herself, going to do something foolish. She was not going to hope for things that had no business being hoped for by a woman in her position. She was going to remain practical, sensible. She was going to keep her eyes open and her feet on the ground, but she was also, she admitted to herself on a quiet Thursday evening, sitting in her small room with the window cracked and the Montana sky going dark above the mountains, no longer entirely certain what the ground looked like from where she was standing.
And she thought that maybe, just maybe, that was all right. That maybe standing somewhere unfamiliar didn't have to mean standing somewhere wrong. And in the boarding house kitchen on the edge of Red Quill, while the stars came out one by one above the Montana territory, and the summer heat finally began to ease, Amelia Whitaker sat down her book, looked at the ceiling, and let herself feel just for a moment like someone worth seeing. The rumors started the way most things started in Red Willow Creek, quietly, and then all at once. By the second week of August, there wasn't a person in town who didn't know that Nathaniel Carter had taken to stopping at Caldwell's boarding house too, and sometimes three times a week.