Clara looked up, surprised. "He said that?"
"Said you could bake bread in a windstorm and negotiate with a merchant like a circuit judge."
A small, involuntary thing crossed her face, not quite a smile, but close. It disappeared quickly. "What exactly are you proposing?"
Callum set both hands flat on the table. "A legal arrangement. Civil ceremony, nothing more than that unless we both decide otherwise down the road. You'll have your own space, your own standing, and the legal right to remain on this property. In return, you help run the household and the accounts."
Clara was quiet for a long moment. She looked at the steam rising from the coffee cup. "People will talk."
"People always talk. It doesn't change the weather or the harvest."
She looked at him directly for the first time. "Why would you do this? You don't know me."
"I know your father. That's enough."
She stared at the table. Outside, the wind pushed against the window shutters, and the oil lamp threw an unsteady light across her face. At last, she drew a long breath. "When?"
"Thursday," he said. "The circuit judge comes through Boise City Thursday morning. Simple as signing a land deed."
Clara looked at him one more time, at his still face, his careful eyes, and the way he sat without fidgeting, like a man who had learned patience the hard way. She gave a single, slow nod.
Thursday came in cold. A thin skim of ice had formed overnight on the water trough, and the aspens had lost most of their gold to an overnight wind. Callum woke before dawn, which was not unusual. What was unusual was that he shaved. He found a clean shirt in the trunk at the foot of the cot, dark wool, his mother's choice, kept for Sundays he no longer observed.
He pulled it on and looked at his reflection in the blade of his hunting knife, which was the closest thing to a mirror the cabin possessed. He looked like what he was, a man who had lived hard and outdoors for most of his life. There wasn't much to be done about it. When he came out of the cabin, Clara was already standing by the fence.
She was wearing a dress the color of winter sage, deep gray-green, modest at the collar, with small pearl buttons down the front that caught the morning light. It had clearly been pressed the night before. She had done her hair differently, pinned at the sides and left loose behind, and she stood very straight in the cold air with her hands at her sides. She looked nothing like a woman who had arrived 4 days ago with worn-through boots and despair sitting on her shoulders.