Of course, I'm staying, Clare said. He nodded once. He picked up the letter. Thank you for what you did, he said with Harriet. She's a good woman, Clare said.
She deserved the truth. Thomas looked at the letter one more time. He's not going to stop, he said. This, he held it up briefly. This is the kind of man who does not stop.
No, Clare agreed. He probably isn't. Then we'd better not stop either, Thomas said. He went upstairs. Clare sat at the kitchen table and listened to the house around her.
And somewhere upstairs, she could hear Ben's voice talking to Noah about something. The small rising and falling cadence of a child who had remembered that words were available to him and was making up for lost time. She pressed her hands flat on the table. He's not going to stop. She knew it was true.
The kind of man who wrote that letter, who used a grieving woman's love for her dead cousin's children as a strategic lever. That was not a man deterred by a failed first move. That was a man who would regroup, who would find another angle. She just didn't know yet what angle he would find. She was about to find out.
The county official arrived on a Thursday morning, 10 days after Thomas and Jacob's trip to Milbrook. Clare was in the yard with Noah and Ben when the wagon came up the road, and she knew from the way it moved, purposeful official, not the meandering approach of a neighbor or delivery, that it was not a social call. The man who climbed down was in his 50s in a decent coat with the particular bearing of someone exercising a function. "Walker Ranch," he said. "Yes," Clare said.
"I'm looking for Thomas Walker. He's in the barn. I'll get him." She looked at the man steadily. Can I ask what this is about?
The man looked at her with the assessing gaze of someone deciding how much to say to someone whose function he hadn't established. County welfare inspector, he said. We've received a complaint. I'm here to conduct an assessment of the household. Clare's stomach dropped.
She kept her face entirely still. I see. She said, "Please come inside. I'll get Mr. Walker." She got Thomas from the barn in 60 seconds.
Walking fast, not running. She told him in 10 words. County welfare inspector. Complaint filed. He's in the kitchen.