She held Margaret's gaze without any particular hostility, just steadiness. I don't think you're a bad person. I think you are a person who believes the world has a correct order and gets frightened when it shows signs of rearranging itself. That's a very human thing to feel. But it's not my job to maintain the arrangement for you.
The Sinclair sisters exchanged a look. Margaret Aldridge's expression went through something complicated. For a moment, just a moment, Clara thought she saw something underneath the composure that was less like malice and more like a woman who had made a very long series of strategic decisions, and occasionally wondered what it would have felt like to make different ones. Then the composure reassembled. "You're very sure of yourself," Margaret said.
"I'm sure of a few things," Clara said. I'm sure I pick up what's mine. I'm sure I don't discount my own worth for anyone's convenience. And I'm sure that whatever happens, I can live with the choices I make. She paused.
"Can you say the same? " It was perhaps too direct. She knew it as she said it felt the edge of it. The way it cut closer than was strictly necessary. But she had spent four years being the person who absorbed other people's cruelties with composed silence, and she found standing in this crowded square in the September heat, that she was no longer willing to absorb this one. Margaret said nothing.
She turned and walked away, the Sinclair sisters falling into formation behind her. Clara let out a slow breath. She turned back toward the auction square and found that Ethan Callahan was standing 20 feet away, completely still, looking directly at her. He had crossed the square at some point in the previous few minutes, and from the angle of his position, she understood with a cold precision that he had heard at least part of the conversation. She waited for what his face would do.
What it did was something she hadn't expected. He looked at her, the way someone looks at a thing they have been trying to see clearly for a long time and have finally fully seen. Not with surprise, with a kind of arriving, the expression of a man who has been traveling towards something and has just understood exactly where he is. He walked toward her. She didn't move.
He stopped in front of her and they were in the middle of the Founders Day auction with 200 people within earshot. And he looked at her and said quietly enough that only she could hear it. "Are you all right? " "Yes," she said. And then, because he had asked her to tell him what she actually thought, I may have been somewhat more direct than the situation required. "You were exactly as direct as the situation required," he said. ""You heard most of it. "" He held her gaze.
Clara, I need to tell you something. And I need to tell it to you here in this square in front of however many people are currently watching because I am finished with the version of this where I let other people set the terms of what I'm allowed to show. She went very still. "Clara, I'm in love with you," he said simply,, completely without the architecture of circumspection around it. I've been working up to saying it plainly for weeks, and I've decided that waiting for the perfect moment is just another form of letting other people decide when I get to live my own life.
He paused. I'm not asking you to say it back. I'm not asking you for anything right now. I just needed you to know it as a fact stated clearly with no hedging. The square continued around them.
The auctioneers's voice carried across the crowd. Two horses changed hands somewhere to the left. The world conducted its business with complete indifference to the fact that Clara Whitfield was standing in the middle of it with something cracking open in her chest that she had spent four years learning to prevent. She opened her mouth. She closed it.
She looked at this man, this steady, patient, plain-spoken man who had sat in her shop chair and talked to her about grief and contracts and the lonely way his father had lived. And she felt the last of the carefully constructed distance collapse inward like a fence in a flood. She was going to cry. She was absolutely not going to cry in the middle of the Founders Day auction in front of 200 people. She breathed.
"That is a considerable thing to say out loud," she managed. "I know," he said. "I meant every word of it. " "In front of... " She glanced sideways at the crowd, several members of which were no longer pretending not to watch. In front of all of these people. "All of these people," he confirmed.
I'll say it again if it would help. "It would not help," she said with a precision that made something in his face do the thing it did. The almost smile, but closer to actual than she'd ever seen it. Ethan, she said his name, and it had the weight of everything she hadn't been ready to say until this moment. The Tuesdays and the Thursdays, and the note in the tin box, and the blue dress, and the long, honest conversations that had taken the wall apart, one carefully placed word at a time.
I need you to understand something about me. "Tell me. " "I am not... I am not easy," she said. I don't trust quickly and I don't forgive quickly and I have opinions about every single thing and I will always always tell you what I actually think even when it's not what you want to hear. I keep accounts.
I pick up my own wages out of the dirt. I do not perform gratitude for things I haven't asked for and I do not perform helplessness to make anyone feel useful. She looked at him very directly. I I am not the soft landing that this town thinks a man in your position deserves. "No," he agreed.
"You're better than that. " She stared at him. I don't need a soft landing, he said. I need someone who tells me the truth. I have enough people in my life who tell me what they think I want to hear. They are not useful.
They are comfortable. And I have found that comfortable is frequently the opposite of honest. He held her gaze. I want the person who tells me what she actually thinks. I want the person who keeps accounts and picks wages up from the dirt and has opinions about every single thing.
I want you, Clara, the complete version. I am not interested in a reduced one. In the crowd, someone had noticed that Ethan Callahan and Clara Whitfield were standing very close together in the middle of the auction square, and the noticing was spreading outward in the quiet incremental way that community attention spread when something significant was happening, and everyone understood that it was significant. Margaret Aldridge had turned back and was watching from a distance with an expression that was unreadable. Ruth Callaway, who had spotted Clara from across the square and had been working her way through the crowd toward her.