Clare said, "A quiet, invisible campaign is hard to fight. A formal legal document." She nodded toward his coat pocket. "That's something Daryl can work with." Thomas stared at her for a moment.
Then he went inside and found his children at the kitchen table, and he looked at all five of them for a long moment. Jacob straightbacked and tight jawed. Emily holding Ben's hand. Lily watching her father with the enormous eyes of a child who trusts him completely and is frightened and trying not to show it. Noah utterly still in his corner of the room way.
Ben clutching George the rabbit against his chest. Thomas pulled out his chair and sat down. "Listen to me," he said. "Not loud, completely steady. Nobody is taking this ranch.
Nobody is separating this family. I need you to trust me." We trust you, P. Lily said instantly. Emily nodded.
Jacob nodded. Noah said nothing, but his chin came up slightly in a way that meant the same thing. Ben looked at Thomas and then at Clare standing in the doorway. "Miss Clare's going to fix it," Ben said with complete confidence as though this were a known fact like the direction of the wind or the reliability of mourning. Thomas looked at Clare.
Clare looked at Ben. She felt something enormous and almost unbearable move through her chest and she pressed it down because there was no time for it right now. "Your paw and I are going to fix it together," she said. "But I need all of you to do something for me this week." They looked at her.
Be exactly who you are, she said. "Don't perform. Don't try to look like something. Just be this family the way you are everyday. Can you do that?"
Five heads nodded. She looked at Thomas. He gave her the smallest nod. She went to send the telegram to Darrow. The week that followed was the hardest Clare had spent in years and the most alive she had felt in longer than that.
She and Thomas sat at the kitchen table after the children were in bed every night going through what they had. The documentation box, the school records, the livestock logs. Thomas had kept meticulous. She discovered his own careful handwriting, recording every head of cattle, every medical treatment, every birth and loss going back three years. He had not been neglecting the ranch.
He had been documenting it obsessively. A man who knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he might need to prove what he was doing. "Why did you keep these?" Clare asked on the second night, holding up a ledger of the livestock logs. Thomas looked at it.