The gate was open. Duchess was in the paddock beyond, older and calmer than she'd been that first afternoon. Ryder had done that, had taken that difficult, fearful animal, and given her the specific patience required to trust. Clara rested her arms on the fence and looked at the horse and felt the particular ache of caring about something you have no guarantee of keeping. He left this morning.
She turned. It was Miller himself, a broad gray-haired man with a permanently windburned face who smelled of horses and pipe tobacco. I was coming from the direction of the barn, wiping his hands on a cloth, looking at her with an expression that was sympathetic in the way of someone who has watched this kind of thing before. What do you mean he left? Clara said, packed up, settled his account with me.
Miller shrugged, not unkindly. He didn't say where, just said he needed to move on. Said to tell you to, he stopped. Well, he said a few things and then took most of them back. Said to tell you Duchess would be fine.
Clara stared at him. That's all he said, Miller confirmed. Duchess would be fine. She walked home. She walked home and opened the shop and did not turn on any lamps and sat at the dark worktable and stayed there for a while doing nothing much at all, which was not something she did, and which she thought said everything about the state she was in.
She had told him she was scared. She had told him she needed patience. She had stood at the edge of something honest, and he had listened, and then he had packed a bag and left without a word. Seemed like you needed someone to stand next to you. That was what he'd said the first morning on the boardwalk and she had believed had built weeks of careful feeling on the belief that he was someone who stayed, who did the steady, quiet, necessary work of staying.
And he hadn't. She sat in the dark shop and breathed. After a while, she got up and lit a lamp and went back to work because that was what there was to do. She hemmed a skirt. She repaired a split seam on a cavalry officer's coat.
She made a list of the supplies she needed to order before the end of the month. She did it all with the mechanical competence of someone who has performed these tasks so many times they require no conscious thought, which left her conscious mind free to do things she would have preferred it not do. She thought about what he'd felt, tried to assemble it from the pieces she had. The conversation in the shop after Decker, it stopped being just useful a while ago. The wedding.
And I looked before when you arrived, the quality of his stillness when she'd held his face to clean the cut at his lip. She was not misreading these things. She was not so far gone that she had invented them wholesale. There had been something real in all of it, and she had said as much, had said she was in a similar position, had said she needed patience. And he had looked at her with those dark eyes and said, "I can manage. " And she had believed him, and now Duchess would be fine.