You thought correctly, she said. He smiled. The full one, the one she had been collecting without admitting she was collecting them since the first time she had seen it on a Thursday morning on the front steps seven months ago. I don't have a ring yet, he said. I intended to have a ring.
Get one when you find the right one, she said. There's no rush. Most women would want I'm not most women, she said. No, he said you are not. He paused.
Is there anything you need from me right now? Anything formal? Anything official. Go back to the ranch. She said, "Tell your father." I'll be there Sunday.
He already knows. Nathaniel said, "She stopped. He already knows. He knew before I did." Nathaniel said, "Or he decided before I acted on it. He told me last week that if I was going to do it, I should do it." He said he paused and she saw something move through his face.
He said that a woman who showed up for the hard things before she was asked to was a woman worth keeping. He said I should go ask you before I talked myself into waiting for a better moment. She looked at the desk. She breathed. Your father, she said carefully, is a remarkable man.
He would find that embarrassing, Nathaniel said. I know, she said. Don't tell him I said it. He put his hat on. Sunday, she said, and he left.
She stood at the desk for a full minute after the door closed, not moving, her hands flat on the open ledger, the morning light coming through the windows and the quiet of Caldwell's boarding house around her. Then she picked up her pen, and she finished the entry she had been working on when he walked in, because she was still herself, still practical, still a woman who finished what she started regardless of what happened in the middle of it. But her handwriting for the rest of that morning had a lightness to it that Margaret noticed and did not comment on, which was its own form of kindness. The news moved through Red Willow Creek the way news always moved faster than anyone had a right to expect. Carried on the invisible current of a small community's constant low-level attention to itself.
By Wednesday, Amelia had heard it mentioned in the general store. By Thursday, it had reached the post office. And on Friday, Edith Marsh came into Caldwells specifically to shake her hand and say with a brightness that was entirely genuine. I told my father this was coming. Did he agree?