The man nodded slowly. "I'll pass it along," he said. They left. Daniel turned to Clara. She realized her hands were trembling slightly and pressed them flat against her skirt. "You shouldn't have stepped in front of me," he said.
E, you were about to do something that would have given Hollis grounds to claim provocation. She said, I stepped in front of you so you didn't have to. He stared at her. Clara, he said, Daniel, that man didn't touch me. She said, didn't threaten me.
Made a calculation and decided I wasn't worth the trouble, which is exactly what I counted on. I was quiet for a long moment. Something was moving through him. Frustration and gratitude and something else, something harder to name. You can't keep doing that, he said.
Doing what? Standing between my family and everything that's coming at it, he said, "That's not." He stopped, started again. "That's not what I hired you to do." "No," she agreed.
"It's not." "Then why do you keep doing it?" She looked at him steadily. "Because it needs doing," she said. "And I'm here.
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he turned and walked back toward the barn, and Clara stood in the yard until she was sure her hands had stopped shaking before she went back inside. That night, the fire happened. She woke Rose screaming. Not a nightmare scream, the kind Clara had learned to distinguish in the past weeks.
The brief sharp cry of a child caught between sleep and waking. This was continuous, high and sustained and real. Clara was out of bed and in the hallway before she was fully awake. The smell hit her first smoke. She moved fast down the hall, pushing into the girl's room, found Rose standing on her bed, screaming and pointing at the window, and looked where she was pointing and saw the orange light coming from the direction of the barn.
Emma. Clara had the girl's arm moving her. Lily, get up. Both of you get your coats. Go out the front door and stay on the porch.
Do not go toward the barn. Go now. Emma was already moving, already pulling Lily by the hand, already the soldier she had trained herself to be. Clara ran downstairs. Daniel was already outside.
She could hear him shouting across the yard. Then another voice, one of the ranch hands who slept in the bunk house, and the specific panicked sounds of animals that smell fire. She grabbed the large water bucket from beside the kitchen stove, then the one from the porch. She ran. The barn's east wall was burning.