He had been somewhere else before Silver Creek. Several somewhere else's. She gathered this in fragments, a passing reference to winter in a place where the snow came differently. A comment about horses that implied different country than this. She didn't push.
He didn't offer. The past was present in him the way old injuries are present in a person's walk. Visible to anyone who knew what to look for, but not his primary way of moving. She thought about that, about the things people carry that they don't explain. She thought about it more than was probably wise.
What she was not thinking about, what she was disciplining herself fairly successfully not to think about was what would happen when Ethan left. The arrangement existed because of Ethan. When Ethan's business in Silver Creek concluded, when he and Margaret climbed into a wagon and headed back to wherever their life was, the reason for the arrangement would dissolve. Ryder would go back to his work at Miller's. She would go back to her mornings alone.
The town would note the change with the same attentive interest it had noted everything else, and there would be talk for a week or two, and then it would fade, and she would be exactly where she had been. She told herself this was fine, that she had agreed to exactly this and understood it clearly. She did not examine the specific feeling that accompanied the telling too closely. Ethan, meanwhile, was not behaving like a man preparing to leave. He had business to settle with the family property.
That much he understood. There were legal matters related to his parents' estate that had apparently been left unfinished, and the lawyer handling them worked out of Silver Creek once a week and moved with the decisiveness of a man who enjoyed billable hours. But beyond the legal matters, Ethan seemed to be in no hurry. He and Margaret had taken a room at the hotel on Second Street. Margaret had introduced herself around town with a careful, measured pleasantness, and Clara, to her complicated feelings on the matter, found that she didn't dislike her.
Margaret was not the woman Clara might have assembled from resentment, not shallow or cruel or obviously wrong for him. She was composed and somewhat reserved and had the air of a person managing a situation that was more complicated than she'd been told it would be. Clara felt on two separate occasions the uncomfortable stirring of something like sympathy for Margaret Mercer. It was an unwelcome feeling and she set it aside. What was not possible to set aside was Ethan's behavior which had settled into a pattern that Clara recognized and distrusted.
He was present, deliberately, consistently present in the places she went at the edges of her daily routine in the street when she walked with Ryder. He didn't approach her again after the confrontation in the shop. He was too intelligent for that, or perhaps too careful, but he arranged himself into her peripheral vision with a regularity that couldn't be accidental. And she watched him watching Ryder the way you watch someone work out a calculation they keep getting wrong. She mentioned it to Ryder on a Wednesday morning walking back from the east end of town.
He's watching you, she said. I know it bothers him seeing you with me. I know that, too. Ryder was quiet for a step or two. What does it do to you seeing him watch?