Flat and easy, offering Decker nothing to build on. Clara pushed the door open. "Ray Decker," she said. All four men looked at her. She was standing in the back doorway of her shop in her work apron with her arms crossed, and she looked, she hoped, considerably more composed than she felt.
Her heart was going fast, and her jaw was tight, and she was aware of the specific cold quality of controlled anger. Miss Holloway, Decker said. Something in his expression shifted. Not shame exactly, but the awareness of an audience that changed the accounting. This is my property, she said.
The alley behind my shop. I'll ask you and your men to get off it. We were just having a conversation. You were hitting someone on my property, she said. I've seen enough to say that clearly and to say it clearly tomorrow to Sheriff Baines if needed, which I will do.
Am I understood? Decker stared at her. The two other men had already taken a half step back, recalculating. Decker was the kind of man who hated being made to recalculate, especially by a woman, especially in front of other men. She watched the calculation play across his face.
What this cost him, what it cost him to push further, and watched him settle. "We're done here," he said as though it were his decision. "Good evening," Clara said. They went. She waited until their footsteps faded down the alley before she let herself exhale.
Ryder was leaning against the wall, his thumb pressed against his jaw where Decker had connected. His expression was the same as it had been throughout. The same patience, the same steadiness, but there was a tightness around his eyes that was new. Whether it was pain or something else, she couldn't tell. Come inside, she said.
Clara, Ryder, come inside. He came. She sat him at the work table and found the cloth she kept for cuts and wetted at the basin and came back. He watched her come with an expression she couldn't read completely, something careful and a little wary, like he wasn't used to being fussed over and hadn't decided how he felt about it. She tilted his face up by the chin to look at the jaw.
It was going to bruise. There was a small split at the corner of his lip that was bleeding slowly. "Hold still," she said. He held still. She pressed the cloth to his lip, and he didn't make a sound.