And because I like being here. He said the last part without looking at her. She noticed that. She noticed it. Thursday, she said.
He put his hat on. Thursday, he confirmed and went out the back. By the end of the second week, Silver Creek had made up its mind. Clara could read it in the way people looked at them on their morning walks. The satisfaction in it, the warmth that communities feel when two of their own find their way toward each other.
The story people told themselves was simple and pleasing. Clara Holloway, who had been quietly sad for 3 years, had found someone. And wasn't it something that it happened just when that Mercer man came back? As if the timing itself was making a point. Harriet Bloom stopped merely watching and started making small celebrations of it.
A jar of honey left on Clara's step, a wave of particular approval when they passed. Mabel Puit gave Ryder coffee at her diner with a speed and generosity she reserved for people she'd decided to approve of. The story had legs. It had the shape of something people wanted to be true. Clara told herself she was managing a situation.
That Ryder understood it was a situation. That they were both cleareyed about what it was. But on Thursday morning, when he appeared at her door at 9:19 and said nothing except ready, and she stepped out and they fell into step together, there was a moment, just a moment, lasting approximately three of her heartbeats when she stopped thinking about Ethan entirely. She was just walking in the morning, beside someone she was beginning to like very much, and it scared her more than anything else had. Ethan found her alone on Friday.
She'd been in the supply room taking inventory when she heard the bell. And when she came out, he was standing by the worktable, looking at the half-finished Witmore suit spread across it with an expression she couldn't read. "Your man's not with you today," he said. "He's not my," she stopped, corrected herself silently. "He is, for all intents, Ethan needs to understand.
He's working. " Ethan turned to face her. 3 years had not changed his face, and yet something had changed inside it. There was a quality around his eyes that was new. Or maybe she'd always been too close to see it, and only distance had sharpened her vision. A kind of restless dissatisfaction, like something in him was always comparing the present to some ideal he carried and finding it slightly wanting.
You seem happy, he said. I am, she said, and was surprised saying it to find that it was partially imprecisely true. That's good. His voice was careful. I'm glad for you.