The twelve miles stretched ahead of them in the dark, and the dark was not the kind of dark that belonged to a town, with lamps in windows and light spilling onto streets. It was the open dark of the plains, where the sky was larger than the land and the stars came out in their thousands, cold and clear and indifferent, and where a rider learned to read the road by the feel of it under his horse's feet as much as by sight. Caleb rode with his eyes on the trail and his thoughts on the woman beside him, and he found that the thoughts would not settle into the neat rows he preferred. He had expected the ride to be a quiet formality, a piece of business conducted in silence, and instead it was becoming something else: a first conversation that had not yet found its second half.
For a long while neither of them spoke. The horses moved at a steady walk, their breath making small clouds in the cooling air, their hooves striking the road with a rhythm that was almost soothing. The grass brushed at their legs where the road narrowed. A night bird called once, far off, and was answered by nothing. Caleb thought about the house waiting for them, about the lamp he had left burning in the kitchen and the cold rooms beyond it, and about how strange it would be to come home to a light that someone else had kept, or to a house where another person's footsteps would sound on the boards. He had lived alone in that house since his mother's death, and he had grown used to the particular silence of a place where only one man moves. He had told himself that silence was a kind of freedom. Riding beside Clara, he was no longer certain.
As darkness settled over the plains, thickening until the horizon was only a darker line against a dark sky, Clara finally spoke. Her voice came out of the dark without warning, clear and unhurried, and it made Caleb sit a little straighter in his saddle, as if a question had been asked of him in a room he had not expected to enter.
Why did you agree to this marriage?
Caleb stared ahead. The road was a pale ribbon in front of him, and beyond it there was nothing but grass and stone and sky, and he wished, for a moment, that the question had a simpler answer, one he could give without exposing anything he had not yet named to himself.
My ranch needs a family.
That isn't an answer.
It is the answer.
No, she said quietly. "It's the reason you gave yourself."
The words were not spoken unkindly. There was no triumph in them, no sharpness, only a plainness that made them harder to argue with. Caleb glanced at her, and in the starlight he could see the outline of her face turned toward him, the braid over her shoulder, the small pendant catching a glint now and then as she moved. He felt the old defensiveness rise in him, the instinct to close a door that had been opened too quickly, and he fought it down, because he recognised, even in his discomfort, that she had not asked the question to wound him. She had asked it because she wanted to know who she was marrying, and because she believed, apparently, that a man should be able to say why he had chosen a thing as large as a marriage without hiding behind a ranch and a roof and a column of figures.
You ask a lot of questions.
I've discovered they're useful.
He almost smiled at that, and then he did not, because smiling would have been a way of changing the subject, and she did not seem like a woman who would let a subject be changed without noticing. He rode on for a few paces, listening to the horses, listening to the wind moving through the grass like a hand moving through tall hair, and then he turned the question back on her, because it was the only fair thing to do and because he genuinely wanted to know.
And what about you?
What about me?
Why did you agree?
She looked toward the dark horizon, and for a moment Caleb thought she might not answer, or might answer with a polite evasion that would leave them both where they had started. When she did answer, her voice was as steady as it had been on the platform, but there was something underneath it now, a weight that had not been there before, as if the dark had given her permission to be plainer than daylight would allow.
My family needed a way out.
Caleb's jaw tightened. He had expected many things, but he had not expected to hear his own practicality mirrored back at him so cleanly, and the mirror was not flattering. If she had married for a way out, then what was he, if not the door? If he had married for a family, then what was she, if not the means? The questions crowded in on him, uninvited and unwelcome, and he answered them with the bluntness he used when he did not want to examine his own feelings too closely.