"You don't know a damn thing about what I'll do." But even as he said it he heard how it sounded, and he saw her flinch, not from the words but from the tone, and he hated that he had made her flinch.
The kettle began to tick as it heated. Claire crossed her arms over her chest.
"Give me until Sunday," she said. "He's almost done. He's got maybe three weeks of work left, and I'd like to have finished it, and then I'll tell you everything, every single thing, and you can be as angry as you want. You'll have a right to be. But give me until Sunday so I can talk to him first."
"Done with what? Almost done with what?"
"With what he owes."
"Owes who?"
She looked at him and did not answer.
He stood there in the doorway and felt the house around him, the old familiar weight of it, the creak of the joists, the draft along the floor from under the back door. He felt as though he had come home to a building that looked exactly like his own house and was not. It was the strangest feeling he'd ever had. He had once ridden up on a cow that had died calving in a coulee in a spring blizzard, frozen standing up against a cutbank, and from a hundred yards off she had looked alive and fine, and only when he got close did he see the frost on her eyelashes. It was something like that.