Ben looked at Clare. "Did you fix it?" He said. "Your paw and I fixed it together," Clare said. Bun looked at his father.
Thomas looked back at his youngest son. "Miss Clare helped us more than I can say," Thomas said. "More than I think any of us can say." The table was quiet now in a different way. Attentive.
The children felt the shape of what was coming the way children feel the shape of weather and they were still. Thomas looked at Clare. He looked back at his children. I want to ask Clare to stay, he said. Not as our housekeeper as is more than that.
He stopped, started again. He was not a man of speeches, and he was not going to pretend to be one. I love her, he said simply, plainly. The most Thomas Walker sentence possible. I'd like her to be part of this family permanently, but I'm asking you all five of you because this isn't only my decision.
The table held the words. Emily's eyes had gone bright, not tearful. Emily did not cry easily, had spent too long being the strong one, but bright with something that had been pressed down for a long time, and was now allowed up. Lily had stopped moving entirely, which was the closest she ever got to stunned. Jacob was looking at the table with his pen moving expression processing.
Noah was looking at Clare with the quiet, complete attention that was his mode when something mattered to him. And Ben Bun picked up George the rabbit from his lap and set him on the table, which was technically not allowed, and looked at the rabbit with great seriousness and then looked at Clare. George says, "Yes," he said. The table erupted. Lily launched herself at Clare before anyone else moved arms around her neck, talking at approximately the speed of a runaway wagon.
Jacob reached across and grabbed Clare's arm in the brief, fierce grip of a 12-year-old boy, expressing everything he was not going to say in words. Noah slid out of his chair and came around the table and stood beside her and put his hand on her shoulder in his particular way, deliberate and quiet and entirely certain. Emily walked around the table and stood in front of Clare, who had Lily still attached to her and Jacob's hand on her arm and Noah beside her. And Emily looked at her with 14-year-old gravity and said, "I put you in the picture." "I know," Clare said.
"I put you in because you already were," Emily said. In the actual picture of this place, her voice was very steady. "I just wanted you to see it." Clare reached out and pulled Emily in and held all of them, the ones she could reach, the ones pressing in. And the table was loud with Lily talking and Ben explaining to George what was happening and Noah saying nothing at all, but not moving away.
And in the middle of it, Thomas Walker sat at the head of his table and looked at his family and looked like a man who has been given back something he had stopped believing he deserved. Clare caught his eye over Emily's shoulder. I didn't look away. Neither did she. The conversation with Harriet Mercer happened by letter and it happened because Clare wrote to her first.