So it was always about whether we were alone, he said. Yes, Darl said. It generally is. Thomas folded the revised terms. He shook Daryl's hand.
He rode home faster than he usually rode. He came through the door and Clare was at the stove and she turned at the sound of him and read his face in under two seconds. Her hand went to her mouth. "It's done," she said. "It's done," he said.
She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, he was crossing the kitchen toward her, three steps, and he stopped in front of her. And he said, "It's over, Clare." She looked up at him. "You said you'd wait until it was over," she said.
"I said I'd wait," he confirmed. "I've waited." She looked at this man, this quiet, honest, steadfast man who had carried his family through the worst two years of his life and had let her walk in and help carry it and had never once made her feel like anything other than exactly what she had become, which was essential. Thomas, she said, I know the situation is complicated, he said. I know there are things to figure out.
I know I'm a man with five children and a ranch and I'm asking you to. He stopped, gathered himself, tried again. I'm asking if you'd be willing to make this permanent. All of it. The house, the children, me.
He held her gaze with the particular directness that was the thing she had come to love most about him. The inability to be anything other than exactly honest. I know what I'm asking. You're asking me to stay, she said. I'm asking you to stay, he said.
But not as an employee. As as family, she said. He exhaled. Yes, he said. As family.
The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere upstairs, the faint sound of the music box. Clareire looked at Thomas Walker and thought about a cloth bag and $11 and a pinned advertisement in a general store and a four-mile road up a mountain and a broken porchboard and a small boy standing in a doorway with devastating eyes who stepped aside like he already knew she was staying. "Yes," she said. Thomas looked at her.
He reached up and took her face in both hands carefully, the way he handled everything precious, which was to say completely and without hesitation. And he kissed her, brief, certain, real, the kind of kiss that is not a question and not a performance, but a declaration between two people who have already decided. When he stepped back, his eyes were very clear. I'll talk to the children tonight, he said. Let me be there, Clare said.