Chapter 10 – The Friday Morning

He looked at her.

“I’m not asking what Annie would have said.”

He held her gaze. Something in his face—the particular stillness he wore when he was managing something carefully—shifted slightly. He looked at the letter, he looked at his hands, and then he looked at Clara. She watched him understand, for perhaps the first time, that his silence on certain matters was not neutral; that she had been the one making decisions—the walk, the coffee, the dinners, the letter—and he had been the one arriving gratefully without ever offering a direction of his own.

“I don’t know how to ask you to stay,” he said quietly, “because I don’t know if I have the right.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” she said.

He looked at the table. “Because you deserve someone who can offer you something whole. Not a man who still takes flowers up a hill on Fridays.”

Clara looked at him for a long moment. “Thomas, the flowers are one of the reasons I started paying attention.” He looked at her, and she held his gaze. “I am not asking you to stop. I am asking you to also pay attention to what is in front of you.”

He said nothing for a long time. “Then I’ll need to think.”

“I know,” she said. She gathered the dishes. “Come next Sunday. I’ll be here.”

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She was. He came.

He went up the hill alone on the Friday after. Not at the usual time, but earlier, before the town was fully awake, when the Wyoming February morning was cold, gray, and still.