"What are you doing? " Ryder said, appearing in the kitchen doorway. Accounting, she said. He looked at her. Does it balance? Yes, she said.
It balances. He nodded like that settled something. Then he said, I found a bird in the chimney, and the accounting was set aside for the practical matter of the bird, which set the tone for most of their days in a way that felt exactly right. The ranch grew slowly and with considerable difficulty, because that was the nature of things in the territory, and they both knew it. Ryder's horses developed a reputation that spread the way good reputations do, not through announcement, but through results.
A rancher 50 mi north sent a difficult mare that two other trainers had refused, and Ryder worked her through a full month and sent her back transformed. And that rancher told two others, and those two told more. By the second year, there was a waiting list. By the third, there were horses on the property from ranches Clara had never heard of in country she'd never seen. And Ryder had hired a hand named George, a quiet young man from somewhere south, who was good with animals and bad with words, and fit into the operation the same way Ryder fit into most things, without excess, without drama, by doing the work in front of him.
Clara ran the Taylor shop through all of it. She walked into Silver Creek four mornings a week, and opened the shop at 9:00 and worked until 4:00 and walked home. And in the evening she sat at the kitchen table and did the other work. The work she had not told anyone about for longer than was probably reasonable. She had been writing for years since before Ethan.
In fact, small things, observations, the kind of writing you do in the back of ledger books when the entries are done and you still have pen in hand. Frontier life had a texture that she found she needed to record. The specific quality of winter on the high plains. The way a town like Silver Creek held its people. The weight and warmth of it, the things she saw in her shop that nobody else saw, the stories written in hems and alterations, the lives visible in fabric.
She had never shown any of it to anyone. She kept it in a box under the bed that had once held Harold's winter blankets, written in the cramped hand she used when she didn't expect anyone to read it. Ryder found the box in the second year of their marriage by accident, looking for a boot he thought had slid under the bed. He came to dinner that evening and set the box on the table between them and sat down and looked at her. She looked at the box.
Looked at him. You read it. Some of it, he paused. Should I not have? I don't know, she said honestly.
Nobody has. Why? She thought about how to answer that. Because it might not be any good, she said. And I'd rather not know.