Then he smiled, a real smile in its way. The smile of a man who enjoys a fight when he is confident of winning it. One week, he said. He tipped his hat. He walked back to the wagon.
Clare stood on the porch of the Walker Ranch holding the inspection notice in both hands and watching Richard Whitmore's wagon go back down the road towards Cedar Hollow. And she thought, "You have been doing this carefully for months and it has not worked. And now you are doing it directly. And I want you to know, I want you to understand that directly is how I fight best." She went inside.
Emily was standing in the kitchen with all four of the other children around her. Jacob back from school early for some reason. Lily and Noah and Ben in a cluster. And they were all looking at Clare with the same expression, afraid, but steady because she was there and she was steady. And they had learned all of them to read her face for what was actually happening.
Clare looked at them. She set the notice on the table. We have one week, she said, and we are going to use every hour of it. Jacob looked at the notice. Can we fight it?
He said. Yes, Clare said. How? She looked at her five children. Not hers by law, not hers by blood, but hers by every morning and every supper and every quiet evening and every small step back toward living that she had witnessed and been part of.
And she felt something in her that was not fear and was not uncertainty but was the particular fierce clarity of a person who knows exactly what they are fighting for by making sure that when that inspector walks into this house she said what he sees is the truth because the truth is the one thing Whitmore can't manufacture and can't control. She looked at each of them and the truth is this. She said, "This is a home, not a perfect one, not a wealthy one, but a real one, and we are going to prove it." Thomas came home an hour after Whitmore's wagon left. Clare heard his horse on the road before she saw him, and she was already at the door when he came through the gate, and the expression on her face told him something had happened before she said a word. She handed him the notice on the porch.
He read it standing up. She watched his face and she watched him control it and she watched what it cost him to control it. One week, he said. One week, she confirmed. He folded the notice.
He put it in his coat pocket. He looked at the mountain above the ranch for a long moment. The way men look at distance when they need something steady to fix their eyes on. He moved fast, Thomas said. Faster than I expected, Clare said.
Which means Morrison got to someone before I even got back up the road. Whitmore heard we were talking in town and he moved. Thomas turned and looked at her. Morrison talked to someone already. I think so, Clare said.
I think Whitmore has ears and he heard that the situation was changing and he decided to stop being careful. She paused. Which is actually what we wanted. Thomas blinked. We wanted him to do this.