Clara knew the name. Margaret Caldwell was the widow of William Caldwell, who had owned the largest ranch in Harland Creek before his death, and who had left his wife with an estate, a social position, and a personality that had not been improved by either. She had been pointed out to Clara in passing by Mrs. Holt with the expression of a woman indicating a weather system. "What did she say?"
Clara asked. Ethan's jaw tightened. She said she was worried about my children being left in the care of a woman nobody knows. A woman who arrived under false pretenses from the agency. False pretenses.
She said you misrepresented your age. Clara was quiet for a moment. She had known this would come eventually. "I didn't state my age directly," she said. I stated my qualifications.
That was the truth. "I know that." He looked at her. I'm not accusing you of anything. "What is Mrs.
Caldwell accusing me of?" He was silent. "Ethan." She used his name for the first time. She watched him register it.
What is she saying? He pushed back from the table, stood, went to the window, and stood with his back to her. She says a respectable woman doesn't travel hundreds of miles to marry a man she's never met unless she wants something he has. He said. She says you knew I was a man of some means and you saw an opportunity.
Clara absorbed that. "And what do you think?" She asked. He turned around. "I think," he said slowly that Margaret Caldwell has never worked a day in her life and wouldn't know a working woman if one stood in front of her on a train platform.
He stopped. His expression was complicated. I think I was the one who made assumptions on that train platform. And I think I've been trying to make up for it ever since without actually saying so. Clara looked at him.
You said so this morning. I said I misjudged you. That's the same thing. No, he said it's not. He came back to the table.
He didn't sit. He stood with his hands on the back of the chair looking at her and there was something in his face she hadn't seen there before. Something effortful and open like a door that was being pushed against its weight. "I wasn't just wrong about what you could do. He said, "I was wrong about who you are.
I looked at you on that platform and I decided you weren't worth what I'd been hoping for. And I said it out loud in front of people so everyone could hear. That wasn't misjudging. That was He stopped. That was cruelty."