I asked around after. He stopped, seemed to be choosing words. He came here from a hard situation somewhere north. I don't know the whole of it, and it's not mine to know, but I know he works hard and he's honest. And the way he looked at you when he thought nobody was watching was he stopped again.
Clara was very still. It was the way I should have looked at you, Ethan said, and didn't. And I wanted to say that. She looked at him across the worktable. The morning light was coming through the front window and lying across the pine surface Harold had built, slightly uneven with the folded leather beneath the warped leg, exactly as it always had.
"Where did he go? " she said. Ethan shook his head. I don't know. She nodded, looked down at the fabric under her hands. Safe travels, Ethan, she said.
He left. She stood there. Then she went to the window and looked out at the main street of Silver Creek in the morning light. The feed store, the dry goods, Mabel's Diner trailing its permanent smoke. And she thought about what Ethan had said and what it changed and what it didn't.
And she stood there for 2 minutes or 10 or some amount of time she couldn't account for. And then she said aloud clearly to no one in the empty shop, "If you came here, Ryder Kain," and then left because you were scared. That is the most enormous hypocrisy I have ever encountered. The shop didn't answer. She went back to work.
He came back at 4:00. She heard the back door, not the bell. The back door, the one that faced the alley, and knew it before she looked up, the same way she'd learned the quality of his footsteps on the front step over weeks of mornings. She knew it was him before she saw him and hated briefly how much she knew that he looked like he'd been riding. Dust on his hat and coat, something in his face that was the specific after state of a long hard decision.
Not settled exactly, but landed. He stood just inside the back doorway with his hat in his hand, the way Ethan had stood in the front doorway 3 weeks ago, and the comparison was not one she wanted to make, but her mind made it anyway, and the difference was stark and immediate. Ethan had come with calculation. Ryder stood in her doorway the way Duchess had finally stood at the fence rail, not because it was safe or certain, but because something in him had concluded it was worth it. "You left," she said.
"I came back," he said. "That's not an explanation. " He ran his hand over the back of his neck. Not Ethan's gesture, not performed, just a man working out how to say something true. "I know. I know it's not. " He looked at her directly the way he always did when the words were real rather than useful.