There's something I need to tell you, he said. And his voice shifted, became more careful. Tell me, she said. Before Margaret died, he said it was the first time Clara had heard him say his wife's name. She told me something.
I've thought about it every day since. He looked at the fire. She said, "Daniel, you are going to grieve me wrong. You're going to think the right way to honor me is to stop. To stop wanting things, stop building things, stop letting people in."
And I need you to know that is exactly wrong. He was quiet for a moment. She knew me better than I knew myself. Clara did not say anything. She said the right way to honor her was to keep going.
He said to keep the ranch raise the girls and his voice lowered. And let himself be loved again if it came to that. Her words not mine. The fire was the only sound. She sounds Clara said carefully like a remarkable woman.
She was Daniel said and she would have liked you. Clara felt that land somewhere deep and permanent. She would have said you were exactly what she ordered. He added with the faint ghost of something that was almost humor. She would have been wrong about that.
Clara said nobody ordered me. I came on my own. He looked at her then and and the ghost of something became an actual real quiet smile. The first complete one she had seen from him, unguarded and genuine, the kind that reached the eyes. "Yes," he said.
"You did." They sat together by the fire for another hour, not talking much. The comfortable silence of two people who have been through enough together that silence no longer requires filling. When Clara finally went upstairs, she passed the girl's room and heard Emma's voice low and careful through the door. Don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, Emma was saying.
And Rose, Clara knows. Clara doesn't know everything, Rose. A pause. Then Rose with the serene, unshakable confidence of a six-year-old who has decided something. She knows enough.
Clara stood in the hallway for one moment. Then she went to bed. The hearing room was the largest space in the county courthouse, a room with long benches and a raised platform where the three board members sat and enough space for perhaps 40 people. When Daniel walked in, there were 60. Clara had not expected that.
She had expected Ardan, the five families, and whatever Hollis brought with him. She had not expected the Larkin daughters sitting in the second row. She had not expected Martha Hail in her good dress with her hands folded and her chin level. She had not expected Tom Hrix and his wife, or the young couple from the eastern property, who Clara had seen only once at the market, or the reverend from the church near the schoolhouse, or most unexpectedly, the woman from the dry goods counter, the one who had slid Clara's coin back across the wood on her first day in Willow Creek, sitting in the fourth row, with her hands in her lap and her expression carrying the complicated dignity of someone who has decided to do better. Daniel stopped just inside the door.