Clara felt that settle into her like something coming home. Tom Hendris shook her hand with both of his. Jim Larkin thanked her three times and then apparently felt he hadn't done it enough and came back to do it a fourth. The other families found her in the courthouse hall and said the things that people say when a long weight has been lifted imperfect genuine the words that come out when someone finally has the space to say them. She received all of it with the quiet steadiness that was simply who she was.
And then Daniel was there. He came through the dispersing crowd and stopped in front of her and looked at her with the direct open gaze he had stopped trying to moderate several months ago. It's done, he said. The first part, she said. He almost smiled.
You never let anything be done, do you? The work is never done, she said. But this chapter, yes, this part is finished. He nodded slowly. Come home, he said.
Two words, simple and complete, and carrying everything that had accumulated since October, every morning at the stove, every night at the kitchen table, every conversation in the barn, in the yard, and the long cold middle of nights when the work was too important to stop. Every moment of being seen by a man who had learned to look. Clara looked at him. "Yes," she said. They rode home as they had ridden out the five of them together through country that had turned towards spring while none of them were watching the freeze breaking the ground beginning its slow return.
Rose talked for most of the journey. She described the courthouse with the thoroughess of someone composing a formal report, including a detailed assessment of the judge's hat, the quality of the chairs, and her opinion that Hollis's attorneys had looked like men who knew they were wrong and were hoping nobody noticed. Lily said at one point, "Rose, you can't know what their faces meant." "I can," Rose said with confidence. "Clara taught me."
Clara looked at Daniel. Daniel looked at Clara. Neither of them said anything, but Emma beside them made a sound that was unmistakably a laugh. A brief surprise genuine and looked out at the passing land with the expression of a girl who has discovered that the world contains more warmth than she had recently believed. That evening after supper, after the dishes, after Rose had been carried to bed already asleep, and Lily had kissed her father on the cheek in the particular new way she had of doing it, deliberate choosing it, not the automatic gesture of habit, but an act of decision.
Emma came to find Clara in the kitchen. She stood in the doorway. Clara turned from the counter. Emma's face was doing the complicated thing, the letting through thing, and she held it for a moment before she spoke. I want to tell you something, she said.
And I want to say it right. Take your time, Clara said. Emma looked at the floor briefly, gathering herself, then looked up. When you first came, she said, I hated you. I want you to know that because I think you deserve the truth and not the softened version of it.
I hated you because you were kind and I didn't trust kindness and because I thought if I let myself like you, I was betraying my mother. Clara was still. And then Emma's voice steadied itself. And then you told me I was allowed to be a daughter. You said it like it was simple, like it was just a fact I hadn't been told yet.