“Thank you.” He stiffened and straightened his spine. “Now please go.”
We came together awkwardly, both of us feeling the eyes of the guard. Five years would pass before I could hold him again, lie beneath him, feel his body warm from sleep against my own. I wanted to hold him so close that the warmth of him would last that long. Instead, he kissed me lightly on the mouth and pushed me gently and firmly away. I turned around so as not to watch the guard lead him out of the room.
As I left the courthouse, my head bent over and unmindful of where I was going, I ran into a man on the steps. Opening my mouth to excuse myself, the familiarity of the face stopped me. It was a long ago face that the years had changed. Yet something had not changed. The eyes. Wild eyes, with the metallic glint of birds. Eyes like Aaron’s. But Aaron was dead. It was Seth Hamilton, Aaron’s brother. I froze. It was like finding out Satan had a sibling. He didn’t say a word, just stared in a way that went through me, and in his gaze, I saw that he wasn’t fooled. Seth knew me. Like Aaron, he had known me all my life. He would know who had really shot his brother. Not once like Luca would have done. But three times. He would know and he would not forget.
The first thing I did when I returned to the inn was to move Rennie’s bed into the room Luca and I had shared. After that was done, I screwed two deadlock bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom, into my bedroom door. I could not stop him from coming, but Seth Hamilton would not catch me unawares. I would be as prepared for him as I had been unprepared for his brother. This time, it would be different.
In the next months, Rennie would ask me more times than I could count why her father had gone away, where he was, and when was he coming back, until I thought I would lose my mind. And even when she wasn’t asking about him, just her physical presence was a constant reminder that there had been a stranger once, who had loved me, given me a child, and was no longer with us now. When Rennie looked up at me to pose one of her endless queries, it was with her father’s face, his eyes, his smile, and she must have wondered why so often I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.
If the days were hard without him, the nights were worse. I ached for him in a way that was without sentiment, in a way that had nothing to do with my loftier memories of him, and my pregnancy, now in the fifth month, did nothing to lessen that longing. I remembered too well how he had felt beside me, how when I woke up it was always to feel his arm around me, his leg thrown over mine, as if he could not stand for us to be separated even in sleep. And the things he did to show he loved me, the way he would get out of bed in the middle of the coldest night to get me a drink of water, the way he brought my breakfast to me in bed every Sunday morning, even though I wasn’t sick, how comforting he could be after a nightmare, and how funny when I needed cheering, how many stories he had about Italy. Now there seemed nothing left but a drafty old house and a little girl who asked questions for which I had no answers. And always, there was the sense of time passing, time lost, the certainty that things could never again be as they once had been.
Now began the dark hours, when every shadow in every corner of the secretive old house would gather around me like a black cloak of despair. For the first time, I was truly alone, the way I’d always wanted to be. Like all lonely children, Rennie had grown so adept at amusing herself that it was easy for me to forget she was even there.
The days were only tolerable because with Luca gone, there was always something demanding to be done and only me to do it. On Thursdays, I’d go with Rennie to do the marketing. We’d become notorious since Aaron’s death, and always there were whispers and stares. Everyone in Galen was satisfied that Jewel Willicker’s eldest girl and that dirty little foreign boy had come to no good. Wasn’t that just as they’d always predicted? Yet their hate was strangely comforting to me. At least it was familiar, and there was some solace in knowing that some things never changed, that something could be counted on to endure, if only the hate of a small town.
The nights were the hardest. It was just me at night, without even the enmity of the townspeople to pit myself against, to make me forget myself in proving just how indifferent I was to them. The night had a power that the day never did, the power to shatter the picture I’d always had of myself, one as much a fable as anything in a fairy story. Someone so strong, she needed no one, for her strength was not drawn from others, but generated from some place within. Such piffle. Why it was Jewel who had made me strong. Yes, soft-spoken, affable, and unbendable Jewel. And my sisters. And later Luca. And because they had loved me, they had let me live my whole life through believing I didn’t need them. But I did. I couldn’t be strong alone. I needed someone to be strong for. Now there was no one to be strong for but Rennie, and Rennie had her own peculiar kind of strength, that same strange capacity that Jewel had had
