And I'm sorry for it. The kitchen was very quiet." Clara looked at him for a long moment. The afternoon light came through the window and the fire burned low in the hearth and somewhere above them one of the children moved across a floorboard. "Thank you," she said.
"For that." He nodded once. "I'll handle Margaret Caldwell," he said. "You don't need to fight my battles," Clara said. "This one's mine as much as yours," he said.
"What she's saying reflects on this household, on the children. I won't have that." Clara didn't argue, but she looked at him after he left the kitchen and stood there for a moment in the quiet, and something in her chest did a thing she hadn't let it do in a very long time. It hoped, just a little, just the barest beginning of it. The way a fire starts, not with a blaze, but with a single ember catching in the cold.
She turned back to the stove. She had supper to make. She made it, but the ember stayed lit. The confrontation with Margaret Caldwell happened 4 days later, and it didn't happen in town. It happened at the Callahan Ranch.
Clara was in the yard when the buggy came up the track. A fine buggy, black lacquered with a driver in a good coat. Margaret Caldwell descended from it like a woman accustomed to descending from things while people watched. She was handsome, in the way of a woman who had always been handsome, and had never had to think much about it. Tall, well-dressed, silver-haired, with the carriage of someone who has been the most important person in the room for so long that the posture had become involuntary.
She looked at Clara. Clara looked back at her. "Mrs. Caldwell," Clara said. "Is there something I can help you with?"
"I came to speak with Mr. Callahan." Her gaze moved over Clara with the efficiency of a woman tallying inventory privately. "He's in the barn," Clara said. I'll let him know you're here.
She went to the barn. She found Ethan and told him quietly and watched the muscle in his jaw tighten. "Stay close," he said. "This doesn't need to be a fight," Clara said. "It's already a fight," he said.
"She's just the only one who started it." He went out to the yard. Clara followed because he'd asked her to, and because she was not a woman who hid from conversations about herself. Margaret Caldwell smiled at Ethan with the warmth of a woman who had been practicing warmth for decades and had it smooth as Riverstone. Ethan, she said, "It's been too long.
I came because I've been concerned about you, about the children." "Have you?" He said. "You know, I was a great admirer of your wife." She spoke as though Clara wasn't there.
Eleanor was a dear friend, and her children mean a great deal to me. When I heard you'd taken in, a small pause. Precise. An arrangement of this kind, I felt I had to come personally. "Clara is not an arrangement," Ethan said.