She said quietly. It was not a large moment. It was a very small one. But Clara understood in the practical part of herself that knew how things worked, that small moments were the architecture that large ones were built on. She handed Emma the next tin and they kept working.
The first real blow came at supper. Thomas Callahan came in from the field at the end of the day with a particular silence that meant the work had been hard and had not gone entirely well. And he sat down at the table and she served the meal she'd made properly, made with the supplies from Red Valley chicken and vegetables and biscuits that were not Sunday biscuits, but were respectable. And the children ate with the focused energy of people who had been running in the heat all day and needed to refuel. It was Luke who started it because it was almost always Luke who started things.
Miss Bennett, he said around a biscuit that was approximately too large to fit in his mouth. "Are you going to stay?" Luke, Thomas said. "What?" It's a real question.
"It's not your question to ask." "Then whose question is it?" Luke looked genuinely puzzled. "Nobody else is asking it." A silence.
Thomas Callahan looked at Clara across the table. She looked back at him. She had said she'd assess through the end of the week. It was Tuesday. "I'm still here," she said, which was exactly what she had said to Noah at breakfast and which was not an answer but was also not not an answer.
Luke considered this. "That's not a yes." Luke, Thomas's voice had shifted to something with more weight in it. "I'm just saying what everyone's thinking," Luke said. Jacob's thinking it.
Emma's thinking it. Noah. He looked at his youngest brother who was watching Clara with those enormous eyes. "Noah hasn't let her out of his sight all day." "That's enough," Thomas said.
Luke subsided, but with the expression of a boy who considers himself vindicated by the fact of the silence that followed. Clara picked up her fork. Jacob across the table had not moved during this exchange. She looked at him. He was looking at his plate.
Jacob, she said. He looked up. She held his gaze for a moment. ""Would you pass the salt?"" He passed it. His hands didn't shake. His expression didn't change.
But something in his shoulders just slightly released. She took the salt and passed it on, and the meal continued, and nobody said anything more about whether she was staying. But the question sat in the center of that table for the rest of the evening like a fifth person nobody could see. She found Thomas Callahan on the porch after the children were in bed. She had not planned to.