She thought about Cole in the chair and what he'd said about his mother. She thought about Jesse's nod of seriousness that morning and Ruth making coffee. She thought about the fact that she had stopped dreaming about Thomas Harding's door closing. What do you want, Clara?
Not what is safe. Not what makes sense. What do you actually want? She pulled her hands out of the water and dried them on the kitchen cloth.
She turned around. "I have three conditions," she said. Eli looked at her. "First, the arrangement is written down formally, like you said."
"Not just a gentleman's agreement. Paper, signed, with terms that protect both of us." "Agreed," he said. "Second, if it isn't working, either one of us can say so and I'll leave within the week with fair wages for time already served."
"No arguments. No hard feelings." "Agreed." She looked at him steadily. "Third, this is not a back-door arrangement."
"If I'm working in this house, it's a respectable situation. And if anyone from town has something to say about it, we address it directly and openly. No hiding. No apologizing for the fact of my being here."
Eli looked at her for a long moment. Something in his face went from careful to settled, the look of a man who had asked a question and gotten an answer that was better than he expected and was quietly adjusting to that fact. "Agreed," he said. Clara nodded once.
"Then I'll think about it tonight and give you my answer in the morning." Eli said, "Fair enough." She went to bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress in the small room at the end of the hall and put her face in her hands for a minute.
Not crying. Just allowing herself to feel the full weight of what had just been offered and what it would mean to accept it. She thought about her mother's house in Missouri. About the particular smell of her husband's workshop.
About the folded advertisement she had burned in the stove her first night there and what she had been trying to burn along with it. She thought about what it cost to want something again after you had stopped letting yourself. Down the hall, she could hear the sounds of the house. The stove settling.
The wind moving. Somewhere, the faint sound of a child's deep breathing. Jesse or Cole. Both of them sleeping safely in the house their father had built and was trying to hold together.
She lay down. She stared at the ceiling. She already knew her answer. She had known it, she realized, since the moment she'd said, "This is not my home," in the hallway that afternoon and felt the wrongness of that sentence in her chest before she'd finished thinking it.
But she made herself wait until morning anyway because she had promised herself a long time ago that she would never make the most important decisions of her life in the dark. Some things deserved the daylight. She was up before the sun again. Not because she couldn't sleep this time.