Outside, the snow came down steady and patient and indifferent to everything beneath it. "He's a good kid," she said. "Yeah," Eli said. "He is."
The fire settled in the stove. The wind moved against the house. They stood on opposite sides of the kitchen in the comfortable quiet of two people who had both learned, at some cost, that silence was not the same as emptiness. Clara finished her tea.
"Good night, Mr. Callaway." "Eli," he said. "We don't stand on ceremony here." "My mother said so."
Clara set her cup in the washbasin. She almost smiled. "Good night, Eli." She walked down the hall to the room at the end, the one with the frost on the window and the hook on the back of the door.
She hung up her coat. She sat on the edge of the bed. She was not safe. She still understood that clearly.
The coach was still three days away, maybe four, maybe more. The town still had Harold Briggs, his window, and his opinions. She still had no money and no clear plan. But Cole Callaway had said thank you and meant it with his whole self.
Ruth had told her about the knife. Somewhere in the house, two six-year-old boys were asleep without knowing that the woman down the hall had come here by mistake and was leaving as soon as the road was clear. Clara lay down in the dark and listened to the wind. She did not sleep for a long time.
When she finally did, she did not dream about Thomas Harding's door closing, Harold Briggs's window, or the three dollars on the frozen ground. She dreamed about nothing at all, which was, she thought, the closest thing to peace she'd had in a very long time. The third day brought Harold Briggs. Clara was in the yard with Jesse and Cole, showing them how to check the water trough near the smaller barn to make sure it hadn't frozen solid overnight, when she heard the wagon coming up the road.
Jesse heard it too and turned immediately, with the instinctive excitement of a child for whom any arrival was an event. Cole looked up more slowly, more carefully, the way he looked at everything. The wagon stopped at the gate. Harold Briggs climbed down with the deliberate movements of a man who had rehearsed his reason for being somewhere.
He was wearing his good coat. That told Clara something. "Mr. Callaway around?" he called toward the house. Ruth appeared in the doorway before Clara could answer.
"He's in the north pasture, Harold. What do you need?" Briggs walked through the gate. His eyes moved to Clara with the particular quality of a man who had come specifically to see her and was pretending he hadn't. "Morning, Ruth. Just came to check on things."
"Storm's been hard on everyone." "We're managing fine," Ruth said. "I can see that." He stopped a few feet from Clara.
"Miss Whitfield, you're still here." "The coach isn't running yet," Clara said. "No, it isn't." He put his hands in his coat pockets.