A room should say welcome before anyone speaks, Clara said, standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips, looking at what they had made.
It says it, Caleb said. "It says it loudly."
There was also a dress to mend. Clara had kept a dress of her own from before, a simple thing in soft brown, too small for her now but right for a girl of fifteen, and she let out its seams and mended its hem and brushed it until it looked new. Caleb watched her work at it by lamplight, her needle moving steady and sure, and thought about how much of love was simply this: making something ready for someone who was not yet there, believing they would come.
And there was the mare. Clara had been gentling a young bay mare all autumn, a nervous creature with a white star on her forehead, and now she worked with her daily, patiently, until the mare would stand quietly for a saddle and take a rider without flinching. "A girl should have a horse of her own," Clara said, "not a borrowed one she is afraid to ask for twice." Caleb helped, holding the lead rope, speaking low and steady, and the mare learned to trust them both, which was, Caleb thought, a fair description of what had happened to him as well.
Weeks passed. The winter deepened and then began, very slowly, to loosen. The mail coach came and went, and each time Caleb rode to town he asked after a letter, trying not to hope too loudly, and each time there was nothing, until one bright morning in late winter, when the storekeeper handed him an envelope with Santa Fe on it, addressed in a careful, unfamiliar hand.
Caleb rode home fast, faster than he had ridden in months, and burst into the kitchen where Clara was kneading bread, flour on her hands, and held out the letter without a word. Clara wiped her hands on her apron, took the letter with fingers that trembled only a little, and opened it.
She read it standing up. She read it twice. Then she looked at Caleb, and her steady eyes, the eyes that had faced down a town's gossip and a neighbour's threats without flinching, filled with tears.
She is coming, Clara said. "On the spring train."
Caleb took her in his arms, flour and all, and held her while she cried quietly against his shoulder, the way she had cried only once before, in the barn, when Lily's first letter had come. This time, though, the tears were different. They were not grief. They were relief, and joy, and the long release of a hope held for years.
On the spring train, Caleb repeated, as if saying it made it more true. "We will meet her together. Twenty minutes early, if need be."
Clara laughed through her tears. "Twenty minutes early. And we will bring the mare."
We will bring the mare, Caleb agreed, and they stood there in the kitchen, holding each other, while the bread rose on the counter and the winter light came through the window, and the house, which had once held only one lonely man, prepared itself to hold three.
That night, they talked long past supper, the way people talk when a long-held hope has finally been given a date. Clara told Caleb about Lily as a small child, about the games they had played at the trading post, about the way Lily used to follow her everywhere, carrying a wooden spoon as if it were a sceptre, demanding stories. Caleb listened, and laughed, and asked questions, and Clara answered them all, her voice soft with memory. "She is frightened," Clara said at last, honestly. "A train, a town she has never seen, a brother-in-law she has never met. I was frightened too, remember, when I stepped off that train. I hid it well, but I was frightened."
You hid it so well I thought you feared nothing, Caleb said.
That was the point, Clara said, smiling. "Fear does not leave you if you show it. It leaves you if you do the next thing anyway. Lily will do the next thing. She is braver than she knows. And we will be there, early, waiting, so that the first faces she sees in Red Hollow are faces that already love her."
Caleb nodded, and took her hand across the table. "Then we will practise," he said. "We will practise being the kind of people a frightened girl can trust on sight. I think we have had some practice at that already."
Clara squeezed his hand. Outside, the winter night was deep and still, and the cottonwoods stood guard over the house. Inside, the lamp burned steady, and the letter from Santa Fe lay open on the table between them, its words already changing everything, the way a single letter had once changed everything for Caleb, when a woman named Clara Whitmore had written that she would come west.