You are not asking me to marry you on a porch at 7:00 in the morning, 3 days before a town celebration. She said, "I'm telling you my intention." He said, "The actual question I'll ask more carefully. But I thought you should know the direction since you came here to offer me an exit. I want you to understand that what you're actually looking at is an entrance. She stared at him.
An entrance, she repeated to something real, he said. If you want it, she looked at their joined hands. At his, which were a rancher's hands, strong and marked by work. At hers, a woman's hands that had scrubbed floors and beaten eggs and carried coffee for eight years, and had recently, to her own continuing surprise, reconciled 6 years of complicated double entry bookkeeping with considerable accuracy. She thought about Victoria Harrington.
She thought about the grazing agreement. She thought about 3,000 acres and the cold calculation she had made in her room the night before. And she thought about what it meant that she was standing here anyway. The founders's celebration, she said carefully, is going to be complicated. Yes, he agreed.
Victoria is going to use it. She said, "She's arranged it. She'll have Amelia there as staff. She practically runs the committee. She'll make sure everyone sees exactly who I am and where I'm standing.
She'll use the whole evening to remind the town." "I know," he said. "And you want to walk in with me? I want to dance with you," he said. In front of everyone. And I want every person in that room to understand that what they're seeing is a choice I'm making with a clear head and a full understanding of everything it costs.
He paused. And I want you to understand that you are not the cost. You are the thing I'm choosing, she breathed. The founder celebration arrived on a Thursday evening, and Victoria Harrington had indeed arranged for Amelia to work the event. The assignment came through Margaret who delivered it with her characteristic flat practicality and the additional information that misses Harrington had personally requested Amelia by name.
You don't have to go, Margaret said. I know. Amelia said what? Margaret stopped. Started again.
Whatever is going to happen, Amelia, be sure it's what you want, not what he wants, not what's brave or dramatic or the right story, what you actually want. Amelia looked at her. It was the most personal thing Margaret Caldwell had said to her in 6 years. I, Margaret, nodded. Then go, she said.