Thank you, Clara. Uh, don't, she said quietly. He looked at her. Whatever you're about to say, she said. Don't.
It's 3 years too late. Your wife is somewhere in this town waiting for you, and Ryder is coming by later, and we have nothing left that needs saying between us. Ethan's jaw tightened. You don't have to do this. Do what?
Perform, he said. For me. I get it. You've moved on. I understand.
Something hot and clean moved through her. I'm not performing, she said. I am standing in my shop where I have stood every day for 3 years without your help. And I am telling you that I've built something here that you don't get to walk into and comment on. What I have with Ryder.
The name felt different in her mouth, heavier somehow, more real, is not for your benefit or your understanding. Ethan stared at her. You should go, she said. He went. Clara stood in the silence of the shop for a long moment.
Then she went back to the supply room and continued her inventory because that was what there was to do, and doing it felt like the truest thing she could offer herself. Her hands were steady. Her eyes were burning again, the same way they had been the first morning. But this time, she thought, the burning felt different, less like grief, more like something waking up after a long cold winter, which hurt in its own way, but was not the same as hurt. It was not the same at all.
But the arrangement had no official terms. There was no conversation where they sat down and mapped it out. No handshake, no agreed upon end date. It simply continued the way water finds the path of least resistance. Not by force, but by the natural logic of the land it moves through.
Ryder came by Thursday morning, then the following Monday, then Wednesday, then Thursday again, and by the third week, the rhythm had established itself without either of them naming it. Most mornings, 9:30 her door. They would walk. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn't. He brought the oil for the front door hinge on a Tuesday and fixed it in 4 minutes while she held the lamp.