I could see the windows lit up. He paused. I thought about you keeping them calm in there. They kept themselves calm, Clara said. They're your children.
They're He stopped. He looked at his bandaged arm. They're ours, he said. At this point, you know that. She knew it.
She had known it for a while. It was why she kept putting things in cabinets. Thomas, she said. I know this isn't what you came here for, he said. He said it to the table, not to her.
I know you came for a job. I know I wasn't straight with you at the start, and I know you could have every reason in the world to Stop, she said. He stopped. She looked at him. He looked back at her.
I knew what this was, she said. Before I decided to stay, I understood what I was deciding. She held his gaze. I am not here because I didn't see it coming. The silence between them was different from any of the silences they'd had before.
It had something in it that had not been there. Thomas reached across the table. He put his hand, the uninjured one, the right one, flat on the table beside hers. Not on top of hers. Just beside it.
Close enough. I don't know how to do this," he said. "It's been a long time since I" He stopped. "I don't want to make a wrong step." "You've been making right ones," she said.
"The window, the fence, letting me clean his arm without arguing past the first time." She looked at his hand beside hers. "These are right steps." "Clara." "Thomas."
"I need to say something," he said. "And I need you to let me say it without you making sense of it before I'm finished." She looked at him. "All right," she said. He took a breath.
Thomas Callahan, who did not fill silence unnecessarily, who compressed large things into small precise words, sat at his kitchen table with a bandaged arm and looked at the woman across from him. "I had decided," he said, "that this was what my life was going to be. The ranch and the children and the work and the getting through each day. I had decided there wasn't going to be more than that. And I had made my peace with it."