Holly sent another prayer heavenward. Father God, give these boys homes in Evans Grove. She offered Rebecca the only idea that came to mind. “I have a copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in my house. The boys probably can’t read well enough to tackle it on their own, but it would surely hold their attention if you read it to them.”
“It can’t hurt.”
Holly scanned the school yard. “Most of the town children have gone on their way. Why don’t you watch them out here for another half an hour or so while I go take care of a few things. I’ll bring the novel back then, and by that time Amelia should be here with supper for you and the children.” Holly was exhausted from the strain of the day and her lack of sleep. She needed a cup of tea, a few minutes of quiet, and time to collect her thoughts.
* * *
Mason had been in battle once or twice, knew the dread of heading onto a field with the intent of harming his enemy, but even that had been easier than the task before him.
You have to do this. How many times had he repeated that to himself as he walked down the street toward Holly’s house? There isn’t another way. She’s too misguided and kind. She has to hate you. Mason looked at the book in his hands. He’d read it last night, trying to glimpse whatever it was in the words she thought would help him. There were familiar emotions in there that surprised him—hate, self-loathing, feeling as if God turned His back. He saw himself in too many pages. It didn’t make sense to him that those same pages held such an illogical grace as well. How was it possible for a man to know such turmoil and failure and still trust God? Even praise Him? The words both intrigued and condemned Mason, making him curious for something he was sure he could never reach.
That was Holly’s stubborn optimism coloring his thinking again, he knew that. Part of him wanted to pore over the baffling words a second time, but he knew better than to give in to such an indulgence. If he faltered now, he might never do what had to be done. Almost as if he couldn’t help himself, Mason opened the book again. Surely it was no accident that his first sight was the jagged edge where he’d ripped out the page she’d inscribed.
Some time in the middle of the night, he’d ripped her inscription from the book. He’d give her back the book, but he couldn’t quite bear the thought of giving those words away. Let her think he’d ripped the page out in anger, that he’d burned it. She didn’t need to know that he’d been unable to let it go. Besides, it would serve as a reminder why he must never, ever let her that close again.
His chest constricted at the thought of how she’d react when he showed her. He’d ripped her book. Holly loved her books, and he’d maimed this one—it’d be just as if he’d wounded her. You have to wound her, he reminded himself. You have to hurt her in the worst possible way, or she’ll just keep trying. Steeling himself for the scene, Mason ran his hands down the edge of the ripped page, feeling it like a knife blade. If his words weren’t enough to turn her eye from him for good, surely that would seal his fate. To throw her gift back in her face was cruel enough, but to damage it? That was unforgivable. And that’s what you need. You need to be unforgivable.
Aren’t I already?
Mason passed the school yard where Miss Sterling stood with her hands on her hips, frowning. She didn’t see him pass—she was watching the children like a hawk. Mason braced himself, and knocked on Holly’s door. Just give me this, Lord; let her be angry. He wasn’t a praying man, and today surely wasn’t the day to start, but it’d be so much easier if she was already furious at what he’d done.
Was it any surprise his measly prayer went unanswered? She pulled open the door with a look of stunned pleasure to see him. “Hello.”
He started to say, “Hello,” but stopped himself. As her gaze flicked down to the book in his hand, he thrust it out. “Take this back.”
Her eyes darted back to him, wide with surprise. Time stood still long enough for him to watch the additional rejection take root. “I don’t want this,” he lied. “Certainly not from you.” Her mouth opened, struggling for a response. “Take it.” He shook the book again until she put forth one tentative hand, palm up.
Mason tossed the book almost carelessly into her opened palm, and she fumbled to keep it from falling to the ground. Keep going. He continued the speech he’d rehearsed the whole walk over. “Don’t make such assumptions with me. Your gifts and your attentions aren’t welcome. Not now, not ever. I won’t have it.”
She didn’t respond, just slowly clasped the book to her chest as though he’d just sunk a knife there. Now he had to twist that knife.
“I’ll not be pushed beyond my...” He was going to say “limits,” but that made it sound like the other night had been her fault. Their kiss was no one’s fault but his. She’d been nothing but kind, shown him nothing but grace. As he remembered her soft words, his carefully rehearsed speech left him. For one dangerous second he longed to snatch back the book, to take his barbs back and take her in his arms instead. The flash of fantasy was gone as quickly as it came, doused with the ice water of his own weakness. What Holly Sanders had really shown him was how fast and how far he could fall. No good would come to either one of them if he gave in. “Stay away from me.” He spit the words out. “I’ve no place for you anywhere near me.”
Her bottom lip began to quiver as tears gathered in her eyes. She usually had a mouthful of words for him, but he’d reduced her to silence. It would have been better somehow if she’d yelled at him, cursed him, thrown that book of hers back in his face or whacked him over the head with it. Instead, she quietly said, “If that’s what you want.”
He’d been sure he’d realized how much this would hurt, but he’d been so wrong.
What he wanted? In that moment, he felt that this was the furthest thing from what he wanted. But it was for the best. He knew that for certain...didn’t he? “It’s exactly what I want.”
Holly blinked, and one tear ran down her pale cheek. Why was she standing there, letting him berate her so?
“I’ve no eye for you. Never have. The other night was a slip. A fool move.”
Holly swiped the tear with one hand while clutching the book with the other. “Do you really mean that?”
She was going to make him say it loud and clear, wasn’t she? “Of course I do. It was a mistake. A weak mistake that meant nothing.” He’d hoped to deal her this blow in private, to let her open the book and see his damage after he’d gone, but evidently God saw fit to make him stand and watch. “Open that and see how much I don’t mean it.”
Mason startled himself with just how hurtful he could be, but it wasn’t so hard with his chest exploding in splinters of regret the way it was.
The gasp she made at the torn page nearly made him shut his eyes. It’d stick to him forever. “How could you?”
“Maybe now you’ll wake up to just what kind of man I am. Stop your fool notions and leave me alone.” He turned, at the limit of his ability to withstand the look on her face, and walked away.
Chapter Thirteen
Holly stood in the doorway, unable to move, barely able to breathe. Mason’s disregard had always stung, but his scorn...his utter contempt of her nearly knocked her to the ground. She’d made a terrible, terrible error in giving him that book, in thinking she ever could even come close to bringing him past his pain. Instead, he’d drawn her right into misery with him.
The tears—great, wrenching waves of them—held back just long enough for her to close her front door and stumble into a chair. She opened the book to the ripped page, imagining him tearing it out and flinging it across the room in disgust. She’d put her heart on that page. She’d taken this herculean risk of telling him exactly how she felt and how she believed God loved him, and it had come to worse than nothing; it had come to humiliation. Not the public kind, but the deepest rejection she could fathom.
It hurt so much less when he ignored me, her heart moaned. Holly pushed the book away, lay her head down on the table and sobbed. Un
able to hide it, Holly laid her deepest pain before God. She knew that as a child of the Father, she should grieve how she’d managed to push Mason further from faith. That hurt, but there was a deeper wound: there had been a moment Saturday night when Mason stared at her in a way no man had ever done. The longing in his eyes made her believe, for one wondrous moment, that she was beautiful. Not just beautiful, but desirable. She’d always, always felt such things beyond her reach. She’d convinced herself no man would ever look at her like that. And until last night, she’d come to a sad sort of peace with it.
With one breathtaking kiss, Mason had banished that peace and ignited a fierce longing in its place. He’d torn open the hunger to be loved she’d so carefully tamped down. He’d unleashed Holly’s soul-deep yearning to be someone’s truest affection.
And then he’d crushed it. His words just now made her feel as if she were so worthless he’d do anything to avoid her. It was worse than rejection; it was a condemnation.
When Holly finally raised her head from the table, the small and mousy girl had returned. Holly felt no courage, no peace, no purpose. Every decision seemed beyond her capabilities, and the conviction to place all the children loomed too great a task. It seemed an astonishment that any of them had been placed at all. She was just a plain country teacher trying to do things she should never have tried. Letting pride and vanity lure her into to being someone she wasn’t.
The children. Her mind and heart kept going back to the children. They knew what blatant rejection felt like, didn’t they? They’d been called worse names than she, had been branded bad seeds for no reason other than for lacking parents. She remembered the way the adults on the train had looked at Heidi’s scars, and felt a deep, new affinity for the girl’s pain. All the party dresses and trousers and scrubbed faces lined up at the placement meeting—why was there such punishment and humiliation in simply wanting to be loved? Holly looked at the book and felt an urge to yell. To throw her beloved volume across the room. Was it really any surprise that Patrick always looked ready to throw a punch?
There it was. Laid out in her own pain was the reason these children called to her in such powerful ways. They’d been overlooked, rejected not once but many times. She knew that on an intellectual level, but now her heart understood it. She understood them. She saw them, deep into their closed-up, scrubbed-up hearts, and knew a portion of their pain. It was a terrible, ugly thing to be unwanted. It felt like the blackest sin to let a child feel such pain.
There was the foothold she needed to crawl back out of the black hole surrounding her. As long as she could find some sort of use for this pain, she could endure it.
Holly picked up the book and slid it into the back of her dresser drawer. She didn’t know what she was going to do whenever she saw Sheriff Wright—she made a resolution never to think of him as “Mason” again—but that was tomorrow’s problem. Today she knew who she needed to reach and why.
Holly found Heidi out in back of the schoolhouse, practicing the letters they’d learned this morning. Hearing a sniffle or two as the girl hunched over her small slate, Holly bent down to peer behind Heidi’s ever-lowered fringe of bangs. A pair of red, tearful eyes looked up when Holly touched her shoulder.
“What has you so sad?” It seemed silly to ask why the girl might be sad. She had any number of good reasons to be crying given her situation and all that had happened. One didn’t even need a home to be homesick.
“Lots.” Heidi wiped her nose on her sleeve, prompting Holly to reach in her pocket for yet another handkerchief. She’d given out eight since Wednesday, and was going to have to clean out the stock at Gavin’s tomorrow if this kept up.
Looking for somewhere to start in all that “lots,” Holly peered at the slate. Heidi had written the word “Jakob,” in an unpracticed hand. “The letter K faces the other way, but I like that name spelled that way. Lots of people use a C but the K stands up nice and tall in the middle like that. Do you want me to show you how to turn it around?”
Heidi didn’t speak, but sniffed one more time and handed the slate and chalk to Holly. Settling herself in beside the girl, Holly wiped out the backward letter with her finger and replaced it with one facing the right way. “Who is Jakob?”
Again no reply, but her eyes brimmed up once more, reminding Holly of something Rebecca had mentioned earlier. Holly drew a small flower growing out of the top of Heidi’s J. “Is Jakob your brother, sweetheart? The one Miss Sterling said was placed in Iowa?”
The girl did not venture a look up, but touched a finger to the flower Holly had drawn as she nodded.
“You must miss him something fierce. I have a brother, too, you know. His name is David and he runs a shipping business with my father in St. Louis. I haven’t seen either of them in two years. It hurts something awful to be separated from family like that, doesn’t it? Seems a shame the family that took Jakob in couldn’t see their way clear to adding a sweet girl like you into their home. I’d stomp on back to Iowa and tell them to keep you close if I could.” She put an arm around the girl as a tear left a shiny black splat on the corner of the slate. “Of course, then you’d never have come here, and I’m awfully glad to have met you, so I suppose we’ll just have to trust that God knows what He’s up to.”
“I did it.” Heidi whispered it quiet as a secret.
“Did what?”
“Split us up.”
Holly tried to look in the girl’s face but she turned away. “What do you mean?”
“I made it so they’d take him. I knew that would work, that he’d get placed on his own, but now I miss him something awful.”
The realization hit like a rock in the pit of Holly’s stomach. “Heidi, sweetheart,” she crooned, brushing the child’s hair back so she could see her eyes, “are you saying you split yourself up from Jakob on purpose so he would get placed?”
While no words came, the look and accompanying tears were the admission Holly needed. “Why on earth would your brother agree to something like that? Don’t you think he misses you, too?”
“I tricked him. I stood far away from him at the station and got some of the other kids to hide me until the train pulled out.” Her little lip quivered at the memory. “He didn’t want to get placed unless I was taken in, too—he wanted us to stay together so he could look after me, like he always has—but I heard one of the grown-ups talking about how my face...” She touched one of the scars as tears ran down her cheeks. Rejection hurt so very much. Holly wanted to rail at the world for being so cruel to such a tiny, tender heart.
She pulled the girl into a fierce hug. “Oh, Heidi, I’m so very sorry.” Holly grasped for words that would make it all better, but everything about that story seemed so desperately wrong. The world was such a broken place today. There weren’t words to soothe either of their spirits. Not in all the books on all her shelves.
* * *
Some days it made more sense just to go back to bed. Mason had been a mess since his scene with Holly yesterday, his mind unable to focus on work. It wasn’t as if he’d never had a bad day. Mason was used to bad days and sour moods. Usually, a ride out to see Bucky lifted his spirits, but now that seemed like the worst of ideas. The absolute last thing he needed was to see Bucky’s lovestruck face. Instead, he’d settled on giving Ace a good brushing out in front of the office, hoping the menial task and sunshine would do them both good.
“When you’re down, nothing’s worse than someone else’s happiness, right, Ace?” He stared into the palomino’s big, brown eyes, hoping for a little commiseration. Ace simply nickered, stuffing his velvety nose into Mason’s neck in the horse version of a hug. “You’re always good company, boy.” Out of the corner of his eye, Mason caught sight of the last thing he wanted to see. “But look out, here comes bad company.”
Beatrice Ward was stalking up the street, headed straight for him with a scowl on her face. Of the half dozen reasons why she could be gunning for him this afternoon, each was worse than the oth
er. He tipped his hat, unable to choke out a greeting.
“I’m ashamed of you, Sheriff Wright. Downright ashamed.”
Mason put down the brush, sure this was going to be a very long and painful conversation. “And why might that be?” It was the very last thing he wanted to ask.
“Not only did you fail to attend services this Sunday, but now Reverend Turner informs me you have removed yourself from the Selection Committee.” She peered down her nose at him with narrowed eyes. To this day he could never say what color the woman’s eyes were because she was always squinting them in judgment.
“That’s true.” The only thing he had managed to accomplish this morning was to tell the reverend he was resigning.
“You are needed on that committee. You can’t just shirk your duties. Especially not now.”
That didn’t bode well. “Now?”
She leaned in. “There have been thefts.”
Mason remembered the time Miss Ward left her shawl in church and it slipped under the pew. In the two days it took to find it, she’d accused three separate people of stealing her best Austrian lace. She’d bothered him every day—as if he had nothing better to do than to track down fancy fabrics—until he’d crawled under the church pews himself to find the thing and hush up her groundless accusations. “What kind of thefts, Miss Ward?”
She puffed up and put a traumatized hand to her barrel chest. “My front gate has gone missing.”
Now that was most likely a prank. Beatrice’s front gate was a huge source of pride for the old woman, a fancy, “been in the family for decades” piece of wrought iron with a swirly “W” on it imported from somewhere back East. Mason had half wondered if one of the reasons the old woman never married was the awful prospect of having to replace it if she gained a new last name. Reverend Turner even once quipped that only God would be mighty enough to mess with the gate, for it had been bent in the storm.
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