The worktable was between them and neither of them moved across it and that was fine. That was the right speed. Some things needed to stay at the edge for a little while before they moved. "You should go home," she said. "Put something cold on that jaw. " "I'm fine.
You'll be less fine tomorrow when it's purple. " He stood, picked up his hat from where he'd set it on the edge of the table. She walked him to the back door and he stepped out into the alley that was empty now, quiet, just the dark and the sound of the town settling around them. He turned at the door. In the low light, his face was in partial shadow, and the bruise was starting to show at his jaw, and he looked real, not like a story she'd told herself or a useful fiction or a man she'd borrowed for a crisis, just a real, imperfect, complicated person standing in her alley. "Good night, Clara," he said.
Good night," she said. She watched him walk down the alley until the dark took him. Then she stepped back inside and closed the door and stood in her shop in the lamplight alone. Her hand pressed flat against her sternum where the two large feelings still lived. Ethan appeared in her shop the next morning before she'd even turned the sign.
She heard the door, the hinge she'd been meaning to fix for months, except Ryder had oiled it 3 weeks ago, and it moved silently now, so it wasn't the hinge. It was the bell and looked up from threading her needle to find Ethan standing just inside the door. He looked like he hadn't slept well. She recognized it because she hadn't slept well either, though for reasons that felt nothing like his. I heard about last night, he said.
Word travels. Are you all right? I wasn't the one who got hit, she said. Is he fine? She said he's fine.
Ethan came further into the shop with the specific deliberateness of someone who has rehearsed an entrance. He stopped at the far end of the work table, the same spot she'd stood with Ryder last night. She noticed the table seemed to be the natural border of every difficult conversation she had these days. "Those McKinley men are idiots," Ethan said. "What they did was wrong. " "I'm aware, Clara. " His voice dropped to something she recognized.
The tone he used when he was trying to communicate sincerity, which he was capable of. She'd never been able to deny that. I need to say something and I need you to hear it. Ethan, I made a mistake, he said. 3 years ago, leaving the way I did.
The letter, he exhaled. That was wrong. You deserved better than a letter. Clara set her needle down very carefully on the table. She folded her hands.