That was what he'd left her. Well, she thought with the particular internal voice she used for conclusions she didn't enjoy reaching. There it is. She finished the cavalry coat. She went to bed.
She slept badly and woke before dawn and lay in the gray early light and made herself do the accounting she'd been avoiding all night. She was in love with Ryder Kain. She turned the fact over in her mind, looked at it from the various angles available. There it was. Not the comfortable warmth of liking.
Not the useful fiction she'd invented to manage Ethan. Not the complicated gratitude for someone who had been kind to her at the right moment. Love. The inconvenient fully committed makes you worse at sewing kind. The kind that had apparently decided to take up residence without asking first, and had now made itself so thoroughly at home that she couldn't imagine the interior without it.
She was in love with a man who had just left town. "Perfect," she said to the ceiling. She got up and opened the shop. By 9:00, she had made three uneven stitches, which was now her reliable indicator of emotional disturbance. She took them out, made them again, straight this time, through an act of will.
She was on the fourth when she heard the bell above the door, and looked up, expecting Walt Carson or Harriet Bloom, or anyone other than who it was. Ethan stood in the doorway. She felt looking at him almost nothing. A faint irritation, the way you feel when an old problem resurfaces on a day when you already have a new one. " He looked at her expression and something in his face deflated slightly. The specific deflation of a man who had prepared for an emotional encounter and found the other person busy with different emotions entirely.
"You heard? " he said that he left. "Yes, Ethan came in. He looked, she thought, genuinely uncomfortable, which was not an expression she associated with him, and which made her trust it more than his comfortable ones. Margaret and I are leaving tomorrow, he said. All right, the legal business is finished, he paused.
Clara, I Ethan, she said, I said what I needed to say to you. I don't have more. I know. He stopped at the table. I know you do.
I just I want to say something before I go and I want to say it without expecting anything from you because of it. He took a breath. He's not a drifter. Whatever I said before, whatever I implied, that was me being threatened and saying something stupid. He's not a drifter.