“I can build one,” Ruth offered.
Jonah looked at her.
“You can?”
“I have never built a rabbit hutch, but I am capable of learning.”
Clara’s eyes widened.
“Can we have two rabbits?”
“One,” Jonah said.
“Two,” Clara countered.
“One.”
“Two small ones.”
Jonah shook his head, but he was smiling.
Ruth watched them, feeling something loosen inside her. The household had not changed overnight. Anne’s photograph still stood on the table, and the rooms still held traces of the woman who had lived there before her. But the morning did not feel like a contest between past and present.
It felt like a home beginning to open.
After breakfast, Jonah walked Ruth to the back door.
“I’ll be out most of the morning,” he said. “There’s a wagon coming from town, and I need to meet it.”
“Will you be home for dinner?”
“I will.”
She looked at him.
“Are you certain?”
He understood the question beneath the question.
“Yes. I’ll be home.”
She nodded.
He hesitated, then reached for her hand.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
The words were quiet, but they seemed to fill the doorway.
Ruth’s eyes softened.
“I’m glad I came.”
He bent and kissed her forehead.
It was not the kiss she had imagined when she first boarded the train, but it was real, and it belonged to them.
The first weeks of their marriage were not a fairy tale.
They were better than that, Ruth sometimes thought, because they were made of ordinary things that required attention.
There were mornings when the wind rattled the windows and the stove refused to draw. There were afternoons when Clara spilled milk, when a cow broke through a gate, or when a wagon wheel sank into mud. There were evenings when Jonah returned from the pasture too tired to speak, and Ruth had to remind herself that silence did not always mean distance.
But he began to tell her where he was going.
He began to ask what she thought.
He began to sit beside her at supper rather than across the table, and to bring her a cup of tea when he noticed she was reading by the fire.
Sometimes he touched her shoulder as he passed. Sometimes he paused in the kitchen doorway simply to look at her. Once, when she was hanging laundry in the yard, he came up behind her and rested his hands at her waist.
She startled and turned.
His face held a mischievous expression she had not seen before.
“You frightened me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Not entirely.”
She laughed, and he kissed her cheek.