What did I do with the fourth second? You stood there, Clara said. Right beside us. You didn't move. Emma pressed her lips together hard.
Daniel put his hand on his daughter's shoulder. He looked up at Clara over Emma's head, and what was in his face in that moment was something Clara had to look away from because it was too open and too much, and she was not ready to receive it fullon. She went to the kitchen to make coffee. She made enough for all of them. The following week moved fast and hard.
The way time moves when everything is happening at once and there is no space to step back and measure any of it. Thomas Ardan filed the additional complaint about the fire. Tom Hendris provided a sworn statement about his own experiences with the Hollis Bank. Martha Hail arrived on a Tuesday with a box of records tied with twine and set it on Ardan's desk with the words, "I have been waiting three years for someone to start this fight." Jim Larkin brought two other families Clara hadn't known about.
The pattern in the records became undeniable. Ardan called it systematic predatory lending. He said it with the controlled precision of a lawyer who has built a case carefully and knows what it can hold. Gerald Hollis responded through his own attorney with a letter that accused Daniel of filing frivolous complaints motivated by personal financial difficulty, characterized the loan adjustments as standard practice disclosed in the original agreements, and suggested that the additional families had been organized by an outside party with no legitimate stake in the matter. The outside party was Clara.
Everyone understood that. Nobody said it directly because saying it directly would have required acknowledging that a woman with one suitcase and a letter of reference had walked into their county and done in 6 weeks what 15 years of individual suffering had failed to accomplish. Daniel read Hollis's letter at the kitchen table with Clara beside him. When he finished, he set it down. "He's calling you out without naming you," he said.
"Yes," Clara said. "Does that worry you?" She thought about the letter from the Ashworth attorney that she carried in her bag. She thought about Patricia Hollis's visit. She thought about the barnfire and the three men in the yard and the number 18 days that had been counting down for weeks.
No, she said it means he's worried. Daniel looked at her sidelong. You know, he said when I wrote that letter to Denver, I was looking for someone to keep the house running. I know, she said. I did not expect.
He gestured at the documents spread between them at the window at the yard at the general enormous complication of everything that had happened since October. Nobody expects what they actually need, Clara said. That's why they usually ask for something smaller. He was quiet for a moment. Clara, he said.
She looked at him. After this is over, he stopped, looked at the table, looked back at her. I'd like to talk about what happens next for you, for another stop. He was not a man who struggled with words as a rule, and the struggling was visible and careful. For this household, Clara's heart moved in a way she had not given it permission to.
Let's get through the hearing first, she said. Yes, he agreed. But after after she said it was a word that held a great deal. Both of them knew it. The hearing was set for a Thursday, 9 days after the barnfire, 6 weeks after Clara had stepped off a stage coach into a town that had already decided not to want her.