Thomas had not expected this. Clare wrote the letter on a Thursday evening 3 days after the table conversation and she told Thomas she was writing it and he said carefully, "You don't have to do that." "I know I don't have to," Clare said. "I want to," she wrote to Harriet plainly. She told her that Thomas had asked her to stay and that she had said yes and that she wanted Harriet to hear it from her directly, not through town talk.
She told her that her love for Eleanor's children was not a threat to Eleanor's memory. She told her that she had never tried to replace Elellanar Walker and had no intention of doing so because Elanor Walker was irreplaceable and the best thing Clare could do was make sure her children knew that every day. She wrote, "Elanor gave these children roots. I am trying to help them grow. I believe she would have wanted them to grow.
She sent it. Harriet's reply came two weeks later. It was one paragraph. She said she had read Clare's letter three times. She said she had looked at the photograph of Elellanor as a little girl that she had given Lily and she had thought about what Eleanor would have wanted for her children and she believed Clare was right.
She said she was sorry for her part in what Witmore had set in motion and that she hoped to visit again someday and that she was glad the children had someone who fought for them the way Clare had. She signed it with gratitude and something that feels very much like relief. Thomas read it after Clare. He set it down carefully. You didn't have to do that.
He said again, but differently this time. The way a person says something when they mean the opposite. She needed to hear it, Clare said. And she's Eleanor's family, which means she's your children's family, which means she paused. She matters.
Thomas looked at her. You are the most. He stopped, tried again. I don't have a word for what you are. You have time to find one, Clare said.
He reached across the table and took her hand. He was getting better at that. The wedding was planned for spring. And between the decision and the spring, there was a winter, and the winter was the first winter in three years that the Walker Ranch spent without the weight of pure survival, pressing down on every day of it. It was not easy.
Winters in Cedar Hollow were not easy, and were not meant to be. The fences Thomas had repaired in the fall held against the first two storms, and needed work after the third. The livestock required the constant management of men who understood cold the way ranchers understood it, which was personally. There were hard mornings and exhausted evenings and days when the work outweighed the reward by any reasonable measure. But there was also something else.
There was supper every night at a table where people talked. There was Emily's drawings accumulating on a shelf in the parlor, getting better every week, acquiring a confidence that hadn't been there in September. There was Jacob walking to school in the mornings, and coming home with the slightly stunned expression of a boy, discovering that mathematics at school was against all expectation, even more interesting than the household ledgers. There was Lily filling every quiet corner of the house with noise, which was exactly right, which was how it should be. There was Noah becoming gradually and on his own timeline a child who said more, not a loud child, never that, but a present one.