Her traveling dress was deep burgundy, which was not a practical color for a frontier town, and her boots were city boots that would be ruined by the end of the week. She took Ethan's offered hand as she stepped down, and the gesture was so practiced, so naturally intimate that Clara understood immediately. Wife. The word dropped through her like a stone through still water. She stood on the boardwalk with the dust mat in her hands and could not move.
Around her, Silver Creek went about its business. Wagon wheels grinding on packed dirt. Old Walt Carson's dog barking at nothing on the corner. The distant sound of hammering from the new building going up on Fourth Street. Normal.
All of it perfectly normal. And here was Clara Holloway, rooted to her own front step, watching the man who had not bothered to leave a proper explanation when he ended their engagement, who had sent a letter, a single page of looping apologetic cowardice delivered by someone else's hand, watching him settle his new wife's wrap around her shoulders like a man who had figured out how to be tender with someone, just not with her, she became aware of eyes on her. Mabel Puit had stopped in the doorway of the diner. Across the street, Harriet Bloom stood very still outside the dry goods store, watching Clara the way people watch a man standing at the edge of something steep. They all remembered.
That was the thing about small towns. They remembered everything, held it all in their collective memory like a locked chest, and brought it back out at exactly the wrong moment. "Don't you dare," Clara told herself again. "You have stood in that shop alone every day for 3 years. You have sewn 10,000 stitches and kept this business and kept yourself and you have not fallen apart once.
You are not going to fall apart now because Ethan Mercer decided to come back to Silver Creek with a woman in silk. Her hands tightened on the dust mat. Ethan turned. Of course, he turned because the universe Clara had decided long ago did not operate with any particular concern for mercy or timing. He turned and his eyes found her immediately.
The way a man's eyes will always find the specific face he's been half expecting and half dreading. She watched something move across his expression. Surprise, yes, but not as much as there should have been. Like he'd known she'd still be here, like he'd counted on it. He raised two fingers to his hatbrim.
The old greeting, their greeting, the small private signal that used to mean I see you and I'll come to you soon, and a dozen other things that words hadn't needed to carry. Clara felt something go hot and tight in her chest. And then a voice came from directly beside her, low, unhurried, utterly calm, and said, "Morning, Clara. " But she had not heard anyone approach. That was the first thing that struck her later, turning it over in her mind. She hadn't heard footsteps, hadn't sensed anyone close.
He was simply there, suddenly standing one step behind her left shoulder like he had every right to be. She turned. He was tall. She registered that first because it was unavoidable, wide through the shoulders in the way that comes from real work rather than intention. His face was angular and weathered with a jaw that looked like it had been carved by someone in a practical mood, not a generous one.