He didn't look at her. He was looking at the beam. Jim Larkin came by this morning. What did he say? He said he's in.
Daniel's voice was quiet and certain. He said he'd been too scared before, but that if Hollis is willing to burn a barn with three children in the house. He stopped. A muscle worked in his jaw. He said he has records going back 2 years and he wants Ardan to have them.
Clara was quiet. Robert Cobb too, Daniel said. He came right behind Larkin. And Martha Hail, she's a widow on the West Ridge, lost her husband three years ago, been fighting the bank on her own ever since. She heard about the fire and she drove herself here at sunrise.
"How many is that?" Clara asked. "With me," Daniel said. "Five." Five families, five sets of records, five people willing to stand up in the same direction.
It was not enough to guarantee anything, but it was enough to make something undeniable. Daniel turned and looked at her, then really looked at her the way he had begun doing in the past few days, directly without the buffer of careful distance he'd been maintaining since October. People keep asking me, he said, how a woman nobody in this town wanted to know ended up being the one holding this whole thing together. What do you tell them? Clara asked.
The truth, he said. I tell them she was the only one paying attention. Clara held his gaze. Daniel, she said. H the bank review is in 11 days.
I know. We're not finished, she said. I know that, too. He held her eyes. But Clara, he said her name the way he'd started saying it, not as an address, but as a kind of arrival.
Whatever happens with the bank, whatever happens with Hollis. He paused. Let the words settle. You changed things here before any of this. You changed things and I want you to know that I know it.
Clara looked at him steadily. She was not going to cry. She was not that kind of woman or she had decided a long time ago that she wasn't. And she held to that decision now with both hands. You changed things too.
She said you wrote a letter to a stranger and asked for help even though it cost you. It cost considerably less than I thought it would," he said quietly. "Most things do," she said. "Once you actually ask." They stood together in the cold outside the burned barn wall with 11 days between them and whatever came next, and neither of them moved away.