The petitioners filed this custody claim, Holt said, on the basis of a welfare assessment conducted by a member of their own family. That assessment, in the assessor's own words, found no grounds to support the complaint. He closed the document. The Callahan children have a father who loves them, a home that is functioning and a mother who chose them. The Harlow family's grief over the loss of their daughter is real but grief is not grounds for custody and this court should say so.
Judge Webb looked at the documents before him for a long moment. Then he looked at the Harlow family. Then he looked at Thomas and Clara at the defense table. He took a breath. The petition for custody transfer, he said, is denied.
Ruth Harlow sobbed. Edward Harlow sat with his jaw tight and his hands on the table and said nothing. George Harlow walked out. Catherine Harlow, who was not there, would receive the news by letter, and what she did with it was her own accounting. Thomas stood up from the defense table and turned to Clara.
And she stood and he put both arms around her in the middle of the courthouse carefully, the way he did everything, and held on. She held back. Holt gathered his papers with the satisfied efficiency of a man closing a completed file. Outside the courthouse, Tom Aldridge was waiting with his hat in his hand and the look of someone who has been praying in a non-denominational but sincere way for 2 hours. He grabbed Thomas's hand and shook it with both of his.
He nodded at Clara with the particular nod of a man who has run out of words and is putting everything into the gesture. Hattie Greer, who should not have known the verdict yet and absolutely did, was standing outside the dry goods store when the wagon passed, and she lifted her hand and Clara lifted hers, and that was all that needed to be said between them. On the 6-mile drive home, Thomas held the reins and Clara sat beside him, and neither of them spoke for a while because the silence was not empty and did not need filling. "It's over," she said finally. "Yes," he said.
She looked at the road ahead. "Luke is going to want a full account of everything that happened," she said. "Yes." "And Noah is going to want to know if we won, and then he's going to put his hand on my wrist and not say anything else about it." "Probably."
"And Emma is going to be in the kitchen," Clara said. "And she is going to want to make biscuits. Thomas looked at her. This Sunday, Clara said, we're going to make them together. All of us.
And they're going to be right. He reached over and put his hand on hers on the seat between them. She turned her hand over and held on. The ranch came into view at the end of the road, and the four children came off the porch before the wagon had fully stopped, all of them at once, in a wave of noise and motion. That was the opposite of the silent watchful line that had stood there on the day she arrived.
And Jacob caught the horse, and Luke was already asking questions at full volume, and Emma had Noah by the hand. And Noah was looking at Clara with those enormous dark eyes as she climbed down from the wagon. And when her feet hit the ground, he let go of Emma's hand and walked to her and took her hand instead and looked up at her. You're home, he said, not a question. Clara looked at this boy.
At all of them, Jacob with the horse, Luke mid-sentence, Emma standing straight and clear-eyed and almost smiling. At Thomas behind her, his hand briefly at the small of her back. At this house that had been a job and became a life. Yes, she said. She held Noah's hand and walked up the porch steps and through the door that no longer stuck, and she was home.