You can talk to him, he answers, but there's nothing The sharpness collapsed. We lost two people when Mama died. We lost her, and then we lost him. And we've been He stopped. We've been trying to keep things going with what was left.
The kitchen was quiet except for the stove. Emily set down what she was holding. She turned around and looked at him, 17 years old, broad-shouldered, trying so hard to be the wall that kept everything standing. "You've done a remarkable job," she said. He looked at her with something that was almost hostility.
"Don't say that like it was a choice. " "I'm not" she said, "I'm saying you did it. It wasn't a choice, and it wasn't fair, and you did it anyway. That's what remarkable means. " He was quiet for a long time. "The other women who came" he said, not looking at her. "The first one told us she'd help take care of us.
Then she saw the ranch, how much work it was, how far from town, how hard the winter had been, and she was gone in four days. The second one was here 11 days. She was kind. She was actually kind. She learned all our names, and she made Henry a poultice for his ear when it got infected. " He paused.
"She left because Papa never spoke to her. She said she couldn't live in a house where the man she was married to looked through her like she wasn't there. She cried when she left. At the gate. She looked back at the house, and she was crying. " Emily listened.
"11 days," he said. "Henry talked about her for a month. Eli used to ask when she was coming back. " He looked up at her then, and the look was direct in a way his looks hadn't been yet, the careful evaluation finally becoming something more like a direct challenge. "You need to understand what you're asking to be part of. We're not boys who need a little patience.
We're six people carrying three years of damage. If you stay long enough for us to trust you and then leave He didn't finish the sentence. Then it would be worse than if I hadn't come, she said. Yes, he said. She nodded.
Then I won't do that. You can't promise that, he said. She couldn't either, I imagine. Nobody promises to leave. I'm not promising not to leave, she said.
I'm telling you what I'm here to do. I'm here to build something. I don't build things I intend to abandon. She held his gaze. That's not a promise.
It's a description of character. You'll have to decide whether you believe it. He looked at her for a long time. Then he went out without answering. But he came to supper that evening without being asked, and he sat at the table without the rigid bracing in his shoulders.
And when Eli fell asleep against his arm partway through the meal, Ethan didn't move him. He just ate around him, one arm occupied as natural as breathing. And Emily, from the other end of the table, caught Jacob Walker watching his oldest son with the sleeping youngest tucked against his side, and she saw something move through the man's face. Brief, unguarded there and gone that she had no name for yet, but recognized as important. That evening after supper, she was in the parlor.
She had found a mending basket in the cupboard under the stairs, clearly Eleanor's thread and needles, and a half-finished piece of darning on a wooden egg left exactly where it had been set down three years ago. She sat with the basket on her lap and worked through the pile of boys clothes that needed attention. James' shirt with the torn collar, Henry's socks with the holes in both heels, a pair of William's trousers that had split along the seam. She had been sitting there an hour when she became aware that she was not alone. She looked up.
Jacob Walker was in the doorway. He had the look of a man who had been standing there for a minute already and hadn't yet decided what to say. She went back to her mending. "There's room to sit," she said. He came in and sat in the chair across from her.
He had a piece of harness leather and a needle and thread working on it, she realized from somewhere out of habit or necessity, his hands needing to be doing something. They sat in silence for a while. The fire she had lit, the parlor fire, the first time the room had been warm in months, she suspected made the room feel entirely different from what it had been that afternoon. It was Jacob who spoke first. "Ethan talked to you today," he said.
"He did? " she said. "He doesn't usually. " "I noticed you didn't seem surprised," she said. "You knew he came in the kitchen. " "I was in the yard. " A pause. "I heard some of it. " She looked up then. He was not looking at her.
He was looking at the leather in his hands. "He said things," Jacob said slowly, "that I didn't know he'd been carrying. " "He's been carrying a lot," she said. "Yeah. " The word came out rough, like it had been inside him a long time and the passage out was difficult. "All of them have. I know that.
I know I" He stopped. His hands tightened on the harness. "I wasn't here the way I should have been after Elanor. I was present. I was physically in the house, but I" "You were grieving," she said.
"They were grieving, too. " His voice cracked at the end of it, just slightly, just enough. "They were 7 years old and 4 years old and newborn some of them and they were grieving, too, and I was I was right here, and I wasn't here at all. The fire moved. Outside the wind had come up. Emily set her mending down.
You're here now, she said. He looked at her, really looked for the first time since she had arrived. Not the look of a man assessing a practical arrangement, but a look with actual depth to it. I don't know how to start again, he said. Yes, you do, she said.
You started this morning. You came in for coffee, and you watched your sons eat breakfast, and you didn't leave. That's how you start. One morning at a time. He held her gaze for a long moment.
Then he looked away. You're a strange woman, Emily Walker, he said. I've been told, she said. She picked up her mending. Outside, the wind pushed at the walls of the house, and inside the fire burned, and the harness leather and the darning needle moved through the parlor's quiet in their respective hands, and neither of them spoke again that night, and it was enough.
It was, in fact, exactly enough, because some things are built not in declarations, but in the simple willingness to stay in the same room and keep working. What Emily did not yet know, what none of them knew sitting warm and quiet in that fire-lit room, was that 3 miles to the east, in the darkness, past the Walker fence line, two men on horseback had stopped on the ridge and were looking down at the ranch lights. One of them said something to the other. The other nodded. Then they turned their horses and rode back into the dark, and the night covered them completely, and on Walker Ranch, nobody heard a thing.
The first sign came 9 days after Emily arrived. She was in the yard hanging washing when the rider came through the gate without slowing down, which was the first thing wrong, because men who meant well announced themselves at the fence. This one didn't. He rode straight to the middle of the yard and pulled up hard and his horse was lathered in a way that said he'd pushed it the whole way from wherever he'd come from. Jacob came out of the barn at the sound.
"Harlan. " he said. His voice was flat in the particular way it got when something required controlling. The man on the horse, Harlan, thick through the chest, weathered face, the kind of man who'd been angry so long it had become his natural expression, looked down at Jacob with his jaw set. "Lost six head last night. " he said. "Found your fence line cut on the eastern pasture. " Jacob went very still.
"My fence line? " "Your side. Clean cuts, recent. And the tracks lead off your property heading south. " Harlan's eyes moved to Emily at the washing line and stayed there for a moment with a look she didn't like. Then came back to Jacob. "You want to tell me what your cattle were doing in my pasture at 2:00 in the morning, Walker? " "My cattle weren't in your pasture. " Jacob said.
"Tracks say different. " "Then the tracks are wrong. " Harlan leaned forward in the saddle. "I've lost 20 head in 6 weeks, 20. And every time I follow the sign it comes back around to your fence line. Now, I'm not a man who jumps to conclusions, but I'm also not a man who ignores evidence when it's standing in front of him. " Emily had stopped pretending to hang washing. She turned around fully.
"Mr. Harlan. " she said. Both men looked at her. "When were the cuts made? " she asked. "Exactly.