Thomas looked at her. Something in his face was still working out its resolution. The long slow process of a man making his way from who he was to who he wants to be, which is never a quick journey. "I owe you considerably more than one letter," he said quietly. "You do," she said.
"But the letter is a good start." She walked around the table and she did something she had not done since she was a girl in her father's house. She put her arms around her brother and held on briefly and without ceremony. And he put one arm around her with the stiffness of a man who is not practiced at this but is genuinely trying. Then she stepped back. "Sit down," she said.
"I'll make coffee." "Catherine and the children are still coming for Christmas. If the invitation stands," he said. "It stands," she said. "Sit down, Thomas." He sat down. She made coffee.
The first snow that stayed came in the third week of December, and Elellanar Whitmore woke on the morning of Christmas Eve to find her farm transformed by it. The fields white, the barn roof white, the fence lines she had repaired, and the kitchen garden she had put to bed for winter, all quietly covered, and the whole 60 acres silent in the particular way that snow silences a landscape, pressing out everything that isn't essential. She stood at her kitchen window with her first coffee of the morning and she looked at it all. Thomas and Catherine and the three children arrived at noon, which was when she had told them to arrive, which meant Thomas had planned their departure carefully, which was so very Thomas that she had to smile at it. The children came through door with the barely contained energy of young people in a new place.
And the oldest, a girl of 14 named Abigail, stopped in the middle of the kitchen and looked around at the shelves of preserves and the good stove and the organized warmth of it and said in the frank tone of a teenager who has not yet learned to veil her assessments. This is wonderful. Thank you, Eleanor said. Father said it was a farm, Abigail said with a glance at Thomas that communicated she had expected something rather more rustic. It is a farm, Elellanor said.
It's also a home. It's both, Abigail said with the decisive certainty of a girl filing this information correctly. Can I see the chickens? Eleanor showed her the chickens. She showed all three children the barn and the winter fields and the repaired fence lines, and she answered their questions with the same directness she brought to all questions.
And by the time they came back inside, Catherine had set the table with the cloth she'd apparently brought from town, and Thomas was looking at Eleanor's ledger, which she had left open on the kitchen shelf, not as a statement, but simply because she had been working in it that morning, with an expression she didn't fully catch before he noticed her noticing. May I? He asked, gesturing at the ledger. You may, she said. He read through it with the careful attention he gave to financial documents, which was absolute.
He read for a long time. When he closed it, he set it back precisely where it had been, and he said nothing for a moment. Elellanor, he said. Thomas, she said, this operation, he stopped, started again. Do you know what this operation is worth?
To the penny, she said. He looked at her. Something in his face that she had seen there all her life. The older brother's certainty, the benevolent authority had been replaced gradually and now completely by something else. Something that looked like admiration with no qualification attached to it.