It makes them ask uncomfortable questions about their own choices. It is easier to find a flaw in the person who sacrificed. So they found one. They called her cold. They called her controlling.
They said her father had wanted more visitors than she allowed and that she had kept him from the people who loved him. None of it was true, but truth Clara had learned was less durable than rumor in a small town. She arrived in Willow Creek on a Tuesday morning in late October, stepping down from the stage coach onto a street that smelled of coal smoke and coming winter. The sky was low and gray. The buildings along the main street were solid and practical.
A bank, a general store, a hardware merchant, a church with a modest steeple. People moved along the boardwalks with their collars turned up and their eyes forward. Nobody looked at her with hostility. Nobody looked at her at all. She located the merkantile to purchase the small supplies she'd need for the first week, thread a tin of salve, two candles.
It was when she set her coins on the counter that the woman behind it, broad-shouldered and confident in the way of someone who had never been looked through, studied her face for a long moment. You'd be the woman Hayes sent for, the woman said. It was not a question. I'd be Clara Whitmore, Clara said. Yes, ma'am.
The woman's expression shifted into something that was almost pity and not quite. You know what people are saying. I expect I'll find out, Clara said. They're saying Daniel Hayes has lost his good sense, the woman said, sliding the coins back across the counter. And they're saying the woman he sent for is the kind who makes herself necessary.
The kind who works her way into a situation and doesn't let go. Clara looked at the coins. She looked at the woman. I was hired to care for three children and a household, she said quietly. That's what I intend to do.
That's what they all intend. The woman said. Clara picked up her coins. She walked out. She stood in the street for a moment with the cold pressing against her coat and took one long, steady breath.
Then she located the livery stable arranged for a wagon to take her out to the Haye property and spent the 40-minute ride watching the land open up around her into something vast and indifferent and in its own severe way beautiful. The Hayes Ranch emerged from the flat landscape as a collection of structures that had clearly once been well-maintained and were now holding themselves together through stubbornness alone. The main house was large, two stories built from good timber, but the porch railing had a broken section someone had propped back into place without repairing it. The barn beyond needed paint. A fence line to the east had three posts leaning at angles that suggested they'd been meaning to be fixed since summer, but the yard was swept.
Someone was keeping the yard swept. Clara noticed that the wagon had barely stopped when the front door opened and a girl appeared on the porch. 6 years old, maybe with dark hair and two uneven braids and a serious expression far too large for her small face. She stood at the top of the porch steps with her hands clasped in front of her and studied Clara with the direct unblinking assessment that only very young children and very old people still permit themselves. "Are you the new lady?"
The girl asked. "I'm Clara Whitmore," Clara said, stepping down from the wagon. "Are you Rose?" The girl's eyes went wide. "You know my name."