Why not? Because I don't need you to like me, she said. I need you to trust me, and those are different things. You earn trust different than you earn liking. I'd rather have your trust.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said carefully like testing ice. What if I told you I don't hate it here anymore with you here? It was the most he'd given. Clara didn't make it larger than it was.
She didn't smile too broadly or say the wrong thing. She just nodded once the way you nod when someone says a true thing. That's a start, she said. And she got up and left him to it. But she was halfway to the barn door when he called after her.
Clara. She turned. He looked at the dirt floor. I took two biscuits the first morning. I told you I didn't want any, but I took two after I went upstairs.
He said it like a confession, like he owed her one. They were good. Clara looked at him. "I know," she said. "I counted."
He stared at her. And then, for the first time since Clara Whitfield had walked through the doors of this house, Noah Callahan laughed. It was short and surprised and a little reluctant like a sound that got loose before he could stop it. But it was real and it was everything. Three weeks in the town started talking.
Harland Creek was not a large town, which meant that the business of the Callahan Ranch was by community consensus everybody's business. Word had spread quickly about the woman Ethan had received from the agency. Two old people said that not what he'd asked for, staying out of stubbornness or desperation. The women who'd watched from the depot wall had particular opinions. Clara heard it from Clem first.
He came in from town on a Wednesday with supplies and said everything on the kitchen table and stood there with his hat in his hands looking like a man carrying something he didn't want to deliver. "There's talk," he said. There's always talk, Clara said, about you, about why you're still here. He turned his hat. Some folks saying you're angling for the ranch for Mr.
Callahan's money. Clara sat down what she was doing. "What do you think?" Clem looked at her squarely. I think you've worked harder in 3 weeks than any woman in this town would work in 3 months, and you ain't done it for money.
Money doesn't make a woman sit up through the night with a sick child. Not that kind of sitting up. "Then that's what you know," Clara said. And that's enough. But it wasn't enough for everyone.
2 days later, Ethan came back from town with a set to his jaw that she'd learned to read. He came in and sat at the kitchen table and didn't speak for a full minute, and Clara let him have the minute before she sat down across from him. "What happened?" She asked. "Margaret Caldwell stopped me outside the feed store," he said.