And Clara had felt all of that. But she'd also felt real warmth. Harriet Bloom had appeared at the shop 3 days after the letter with a jar of preserved plums and no explanation. Old Walt Carson had started clearing the snow from her front step in winter without ever being asked. Mabel burned her coffee for everyone equally, but always saved the first cup of the day for Clara.
She had not been alone. She had not been loved the way she'd expected to be loved, but she had not been alone. And now Ethan Mercer was back. She didn't sleep well that night. She lay in the narrow bed above the shop and listened to the town settle into its nighttime sounds.
The distant music from the saloon, the occasional horse, the wind working at the corner of the building, and tried to be reasonable about what she was feeling. It was allowed to come back. Silver Creek was his hometown, too. His family's property was still 2 mi east of town, though she'd heard it had been leased out since his parents passed. He had every legal and reasonable right to return.
The woman, his wife, had done nothing to Clara. Had looked at her across the street with something Clara supposed was curiosity, maybe weariness, but nothing cruel. None of this was unreasonable. People moved on. She had moved on.
You froze on your own front step, said the uncharitable part of her mind. You couldn't move. Three years of getting yourself together, and you froze. That was true. She had to sit with that.
What was less clear was Ryder Kain and why she kept returning to the specific moment he'd appeared beside her. The solidness of it, the complete absence of drama in what he'd done. No performance, no grand gesture, just I see that you're in a difficult position. Here, I'll stand next to you. " And then the perfectly maintained fiction of the coat delivered so flatly and with such confidence that even she had half believed it for a moment. She didn't know him, had seen him perhaps a dozen times without actually seeing him, the way you do with anyone who moves at the edge of your daily life without ever entering the center of it.
He'd been working at Miller's place for what, 6 months, longer. She'd heard he was good with difficult horses. She'd heard he kept to himself, which in Silver Creek was the kind of thing that got noticed and occasionally talked about. She hadn't cared particularly either way. Now she turned his face over in her mind the way you turn a stone to look at the underside, not expecting anything, just looking.
Seemed like you needed someone to stand next to you. She had needed that. She hadn't known it until it happened, but she had. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep and eventually managed something close to it, though her dreams were fractured and left her nothing in the morning except the residue of unease. The next morning, Ethan came into the shop.