He moved back into the house the week after Lewistown, but for a long time there was a stiffness between them, a care in the way they moved around each other in the kitchen, like two people carrying a full pail of milk across a slick floor. He caught himself watching her when she was on the phone. He hated that he did it. She caught him at it once, in early December, and instead of getting angry she held the phone out to him so he could see the screen, her sister-in-law in Great Falls asking about Christmas, and the gesture was so plain and so humiliating to both of them that he walked out to the barn and stood in the cold for half an hour.
They went, finally, at Claire's suggestion, to talk to Pastor Lindgren at the Lutheran church in Grass Range, who had married them, and who sat with them in his cluttered study on three Wednesday evenings in December and mostly listened. On the third evening, Wade said a thing he had not known he was going to say. He said that what he could not get past was not the boy, or the calves, or even the money. It was that his wife had looked at him and decided he could not be trusted with the truth. That she had watched him, and weighed him, and found him to be the kind of man she had to work around.
"And was I wrong?" Claire asked him. Not unkindly. "In July. Was I wrong about who you were?"
He sat in the pastor's hard chair and made himself answer honestly.
"No," he said. "Not in July."
"Then what I did was wrong," she said, "and it was also the only thing I could think of. I'd like to never be in that place again. I'd like to be married to somebody I can tell anything to. I think I am now. I think you got there. I just didn't wait for you to."
On the drive home in the dark, with snow starting to come down in the headlights, she reached across the cab and put her hand on his leg, and he put his hand on top of hers, and they drove the rest of the way like that without talking. It was not forgiveness, exactly, not all of it. It was something more like a decision to keep going in the same direction and let forgiveness catch up.