At some point, the needle went through the fabric, and she made a stitch, and it wasn't straight, and she had to take it out and do it again. She couldn't remember the last time she'd made a crooked stitch. She held the vest up to the light and looked at the damage, which was minimal and entirely fixable. "Stop it," she said to herself in the empty shop. She fixed the stitch.
She finished the vest. She closed the shop at 5:00 and went upstairs and made herself a supper that she ate entirely without tasting, which was how she knew she was in trouble. The trouble arrived more concretely the following Saturday. It was the afternoon of the Morrison wedding. Not a grand affair, but a popular one, because the whole town liked Jesse Morrison and her new husband, Tom Garrett.
And the reception in the square behind the church drew essentially everyone in Silver Creek who could walk there. Clara went because Jesse had asked her specifically, and because she had made the wedding dress, and because refusing would have required an explanation she didn't have. Ryder appeared at her side approximately 4 minutes after she arrived, which either meant he had been watching for her, or had extraordinary timing. She suspected the former. She didn't ask.
They stood together at the edge of the gathering, which was how they usually stood, not in the center of things, not performing their way through the crowd, but present, observing, occasionally pulled into conversations by the gravitational pull of anyone who wanted to congratulate them or ask pointed questions about their intentions dressed up as casual conversation. "You look nice," Ryder said at some point, entirely without preamble. Clara had been watching Jesse dance badly and joyfully with Tom Garrett and feeling a complicated warmth about it. She turned to look at Ryder. He was looking at the dancers, not at her, his expression perfectly neutral.
"Thank you," she said. "I mean it, the blue. " He still wasn't looking at her. "It suits you. " She looked down at the dress, a deep slate blue she'd made herself last spring. Nothing special, just good fabric, well-cut. She looked back at Ryder.
"You're not looking at me," she said. "I looked before. " A pause. "When you arrived," she felt something move in her that she'd been carefully not feeling for 2 weeks. She looked away, found Ethan across the square without meaning to, standing with Margaret, watching her with an expression that had gone flat and controlled. "He sees it," she thought.
"Whatever just happened, whatever that was, he saw it. " And underneath that, quieter, something just happened. She spent the next hour telling herself it hadn't. She talked to Harriet Bloom about the dress and talked to old Walt about his dog's ongoing campaign against a particular fence post and talked to Mabel about Peach Pie, and kept herself busy and moving and present in the actual conversation in front of her rather than the one going on inside her chest. At one point, she looked up and Ryder was talking to Tom Garrett, the new groom. Both of them with cups of something in their hands.
And Tom was laughing at something Ryder said. Ryder was not quite smiling, but there was a quality in his face she hadn't seen before. Something eased, briefly opened. He looked younger. He looked like someone who was for this specific moment not carrying whatever it was he carried.