Ethan carrying the youngest's bag in addition to his own without comment.
Clara fed them and sent them upstairs.
Then she stood at the kitchen window looking out at the barn for a long moment.
"The Harmons know about a teaching position in Milfield," she said.
Gideon set down the supply ledger he'd picked up.
"Do they?"
"Their daughter's been running the school there for four years. One of the other teachers is leaving in February. They'd need someone by the end of January."
She was still looking out the window.
"It would come with a small house. Two rooms. The salary is not much, but it would be steady."
She paused.
"They thought of me because Eleanor Harmon mentioned it to me two weeks ago at the general store, and I didn't..."
She stopped.
"I said I'd consider it."
Gideon was very careful in that moment to make sure his face stayed his.
"That sounds like a good opportunity," he said.
She turned from the window and looked at him directly.
"You sound like you mean that."
"I do mean it."
And he did.
Because the part of him that was honest acknowledged that Clara Whitmore deserved a future that she chose and not one she'd been backed into by a train schedule and a clerical error.
The other part of him, the part that had watched Ethan laugh at a difficult horse and sat across a kitchen table in silence that was no longer empty, that part was keeping his jaw tight.
"I haven't decided anything," she said.
"I know."
"I'm telling you because you showed me the letter, and that was... you gave me information, and that was the right thing to do. So I'm giving you information back."
"Okay," he said.
She looked at him for a moment longer, trying to read him.
Whatever she found made her expression do something complicated before it settled.
"I'm going to start supper," she said.
"All right."
She moved to the stove.
Gideon picked up the supply ledger.
Neither of them said anything else.
The kitchen filled up with the sounds of supper being made while the afternoon light went thin and gray out the window and December settled its full weight onto the Wyoming plains.
Caleb found the letter.
Gideon had left it on the kitchen table the night he showed Clara, and in the morning it was gone.
He'd assumed Clara had taken it or he'd moved it himself without remembering.
But eight days later, Caleb appeared in the doorway of Gideon's study on a Sunday afternoon when the snow was coming down seriously outside and said without any introduction, "I read the letter."
Gideon looked up from his desk.
Caleb pushed his glasses up.
"I didn't mean to at first. It was on the table, and I was... I read fast, and I'd already read part of it before I knew what it was."
"And then?"
"And then I kept reading."
He didn't offer an apology, which Gideon noticed.
"It says the agency made a mistake. That you asked for a housekeeper and they told my mother she was coming to get married."
"That's right."
Caleb stood in the doorway.
He was wearing his coat indoors, which he did when he was unsettled in a way he didn't want to admit.