Chapter 5
Mason approached the pitcher.
The flowers were yellow and white, gathered from the pasture.
For a terrible moment, he remembered Evelyn standing at the same window, humming while sunlight moved through her hair.
He gripped the back of a chair.
Clara reached for the flowers.
“I’ll put them somewhere else.”
“No.”
She stopped.
Mason swallowed.
“She would have liked those.”
Clara slowly lowered her hand.
“Evelyn?”
He nodded.
“She always said a house without flowers was a house forgetting how to be happy.”
Clara’s eyes shone with unexpected emotion.
“Then perhaps she wouldn’t mind sharing them.”
Mason looked at her.
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t believe she would.”
Later that evening, he found Clara standing near Evelyn’s photograph.
She moved away when she heard him.
“Did you know her?” Mason asked.
Clara’s face tightened.
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
Mason studied her, but he didn’t challenge it.
He had already learned that fear could make an ordinary question feel like an interrogation.
Still, the moment troubled him.
Because for one brief second, Clara had looked at Evelyn’s picture with the grief of someone remembering a friend.
Summer settled heavily over the ranch.
Mason’s days began before dawn and ended long after sunset. He repaired fences, checked cattle, hauled feed, and rode the far boundaries searching for signs of missing livestock.
Clara gradually became part of his daily rhythm.
She brought cold water to the porch when he returned sweating from the fields. She learned which saddle needed a stubborn tug to fasten properly and which hens would peck her fingers unless she distracted them with grain.
One morning, Mason found her standing beside Buck.
The old gelding had stolen an apple directly from her hand.
“You miserable thief!” she exclaimed.
Buck chewed triumphantly.
Mason burst out laughing.
The sound surprised him so completely that he stopped.
He hadn’t laughed like that in years.
Clara turned toward him.
For a moment, she seemed uncertain what to do.
Then she began laughing too.
Her laugh was soft at first, then rich and uncontrolled.
Buck, apparently pleased with himself, searched her pockets for another apple.
Mason leaned against the fence, helpless with laughter.
And suddenly he understood something that frightened him more than loneliness ever had.
He wanted to hear Clara laugh tomorrow.
And the day after that.
He wanted her sitting across from him at breakfast and arguing about whether Buck was spoiled beyond saving.