She had said more in that moment than she had intended to say. She could feel the line between professional distance and something else, and she had just stepped across it without fully deciding to. I'll go check on Jacob, she said and started to turn. Clara. She stopped.
Thank you, Thomas said. His voice was rough in a way that had nothing to do with disuse. She nodded once. She went upstairs. She checked on Jacob, who was asleep with one arm flung over his face in the way of a boy who has finally let himself rest, and she checked on Luke, who had somehow managed to end up sideways in his bed with his feet against the wall, and she looked in on Noah, who was sleeping with the particular absolute stillness of a small child in deep sleep.
And then she went to her room at the end of the hall and sat on the edge of her bed. She had come here for a job. The job had changed. She wasn't sure when it had happened. Tuesday, maybe?
Or maybe it had been Monday evening when a four-year-old had put his hand on her wrist at supper and she had gone still and not moved it. She pressed her hands together in her lap. The end of the week was Friday. Friday was tomorrow. She had a decision to make.
She made it at 5:00 in the morning when she came downstairs and found Jacob sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. He was not asleep. He was sitting exactly the way his father sometimes sat, hands flat on the table, looking at the middle distance, and he startled when she came in, pulling himself up and setting his jaw and doing everything he could to look like he'd meant to be there. "Couldn't sleep," he said. "I know the feeling," Clara said.
She went to the stove and started the fire without turning on the lamp. The early gray light was enough. She worked in it while Jacob sat at the table, and she did not push him to talk. He lasted 4 minutes. "Are you leaving today?"
He said. "Is that what you think?" "It's Friday." His voice was flat. "You said through the end of the week."
"I said I'd assess whether the position was workable," Clara said. She poured water into the coffee pot. "I've been assessing." "And" she turned around and looked at him in the gray light. 10 years old, arms crossed, jaw set.
A boy who had been disappointed so many times by someone leaving that he had decided to be the one who didn't blink when it happened. "I'm not going anywhere, Jacob," she said. He stared at her. "I'm going to stay," she said. "If your father will still have me."
"And I'm going to keep cooking and cleaning and managing this house, and that's all I'm going to commit to right now because that's all I have the right to commit to." "But I'm not leaving." He looked at her for a long time. His jaw was still set, but the set of it had changed, had gone from braced to something more fragile underneath. "You mean it," he said.