"I heard." Ruth stepped back into the kitchen. "Sit down, both of you. I'll make coffee." It was the first time Ruth had made coffee for Clara, and Clara understood what it meant.
Not a grand gesture. Just a small domestic one, the kind that marked a shift from one arrangement to another. She sat down at the kitchen table. Jesse sat down immediately beside her.
Cole sat across the table with his convalescent blanket still around his shoulders. "Did you make them leave?" he asked. "We made them leave," Clara said. Cole looked at his father.
"Both of you?" "Miss Whitfield mainly," Eli said. Cole's expression was the closest thing to satisfaction she'd seen on his face. He pulled his blanket tighter and said nothing more.
From Cole, that was essentially a standing ovation. The afternoon went quietly after that, the kind of quiet that settled over a house after a storm. Not just the weather. The human kind.
The tension that had been building since Briggs's first visit had finally discharged and gone. Eli worked at the kitchen table on the ranch accounts. Ruth mended. The boys played a slow, low-energy card game on the floor near the stove.
Clara worked through the pile of household tasks that had accumulated and found herself moving through the house with the ease of someone who knew where everything was. She caught herself doing it, moving through someone else's home with the confidence of belonging. She stopped in the middle of the hallway with a basket of folded laundry and made herself be honest. This was not her home.
The coach was coming in two days, possibly one if the sky continued to clear. She had made an arrangement, and she would honor it and leave. That had been the agreement from the first night. Just until the coach runs.
She had learned not to build on borrowed ground. She put the laundry away and went back to the kitchen. What she did not expect was the conversation with Eli that happened after supper, when the boys were in bed and Ruth had gone to her room early. Her hands were worse from the cold despite the better weather.
The house was quiet in the particular way it got after nine. Eli was still at the table with the account books. Clara was washing the last of the supper dishes. She thought he might go to bed without saying anything, which would have been fine.
She was used to the silence. Instead, he said, "Where were you planning to go?" She kept washing. "South."
"Somewhere warmer. I had a few letters of inquiry out to families in Colorado and New Mexico. Housekeeping, mainly." "Before you answered Harding's advertisement?"
"Yes." Eli looked at the account book. "So you had options." It wasn't a challenge, just trying to understand the sequence.