“Angel—”
Angel glowered at him as he repeated her name once more, but Nathan ignored her and continued firmly. “There is nothing wrong with you. It’s, just, people assume things.”
Angel lifted her head to object, and he hastily added, “The wrong things.”
“How does that make a difference? Even if the things they assumed were true, that doesn’t make what they were going to do any better.”
“No,” Nathan admitted, “it doesn’t.”
They sat in silence. Angel glanced at Nathan. He was looking away, watching the fire dart and dance and flicker. Without taking his eyes from the flames, he said, “I’m sorry I left this morning.”
The dull pain that had gripped Angel’s chest since Nathan had walked out the door throbbed again, constricting her lungs and making it difficult to breathe. Nathan continued. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I still don’t. Everything those men assumed, everything everyone assumes—it will only get worse when people realize that you’re pregnant.”
As her eyes began to tear, Angel forced herself to breathe evenly and to stare straight ahead, unblinking. The room grew watery, blurry.
Nathan’s reaction to the news of her pregnancy had wounded her more than she could have expressed, even if she had wanted to, and the apologies he poured out held the sting of salt. She trusted his sincerity. But she didn’t believe he could apologize for what had wounded her most, because he didn’t seem to realize the unspoken message his words had conveyed: now that he knew Angel was pregnant, there was a time limit on the generosity of Nathan’s offer of sanctuary.
“I can’t stay here any longer,” Angel said abruptly.
Nathan looked taken aback, then hurt. “What? Where will you go?”
Angel hesitated, then said, “Olivia offered to let me stay with them if I ever needed. I will ask her if I may stay with them for a time until I have made other arrangements.”
Other arrangements to leave.
“And if you aren’t able to stay with them?”
Angel shrugged uncomfortably, and they both knew the answer to Nathan’s question—if she couldn’t stay with Clark and Olivia, then she wouldn’t stay at all.
“But why?” Nathan blurted. “If it’s because of what happened today, I will do better. I should have been here to protect you. I shouldn’t have left you alone. I should have been here.”
Angel shook her head. “You can’t protect me all the time. You can’t leave everything else to take care of itself while you stand guard for me. It’s like what you said—me living here—people assume all the wrong things, and some of them think it gives them the right to treat me however they want. You can’t change that, Nathan.”
Nathan was silent for a moment, then said, “What if I could?”
“What do you mean?”
Nathan was quiet for so long, Angel began to wonder whether he had had an idea at all, or if his question had been rhetorical, or if he had merely spoken out loud by accident.
Then, he said, “Marry me.”
Angel felt the air leave her lungs like it had been sucked out. Once when she was younger—long before her parents had been killed in the steamboat explosion—she had fallen out of a tree she had been climbing and landed flat on her back. This felt the same. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. Her mouth opened partially, hanging there for a moment before she gathered her thoughts enough to close it. Words. Normally when she couldn’t speak, she felt like she was choking on them, but this time they were just gone. There were no words left to speak, and no air left to form them.
“I know this seems out of nowhere,” Nathan said hesitantly into the silence, and the words spun through the air, “but I guess I’m hoping that at least part of the reason you’ve stayed as long as you have is not just because of the snow, but because of me.” He paused, then added, “When we met on the road that day, when I first asked you to stay, you asked me a question—whether, when I woke up the next morning, I would want to believe it was real or wish I could pretend it was only a dream. The idea, the dream, of you meant something to me all those years ago, but you’re not just an idea. You’re here, and you’re real. And I think I love you.”
Angel drew back, away from him, and she saw hurt flash through Nathan’s eyes.
“You can’t love me,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked, his words heavy.
So many thoughts flew through Angel’s mind that she couldn’t tell the beginning of one from the end of another. She tried to compose them all—the pain she had felt when Nathan had told her she would have to leave and walked out after learning of her pregnancy, the nagging feeling that he had proposed out of some irrational sense of duty, the misery of the months following her attack. “Everyone thinks that I’m broken and incomplete—that I’ve either sold or lost the most important piece of myself.”
Nathan took one of her hands and looked intently into her eyes. “Because of what happened to you? That wasn’t your fault. You know I don’t think that.”
Angel gently disentangled her hand from his. “I know,” she said quietly, “but that doesn’t make what happened less real. And even if the pieces are still there, I’m still trying to put them back together. You’ve only seen a few of them, and maybe you like what you’ve seen, but what about the pieces you haven’t seen? I need someone who, when they look at me, sees more than brokenness. You couldn’t even stay in the same room as me when I told you I was pregnant.”
Nathan shook his head, staring at his freed hand like it had caught fire.
“Nathan,” Angel said gently, “you couldn’t even say you loved me—only that you thought you might. You have no business proposing marriage.”
“I know people who have married for less,” Nathan said, and from the expression on his face, Angel could tell that he knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words left his mouth.
Still, she replied coolly, gritting her teeth against another spasm that rippled across her back and abdomen, “Yes, but I would prefer to marry for more.”
They stared at each other across the table. Nathan was the first to fold. He stood abruptly, the legs of the chair scraping the floor. “Well then, I guess that’s that. I’ll give you a ride into town first thing tomorrow morning.”
Chapter 13
Even though Effie never knew my past, I couldn’t forget what I did. I was reminded of it every time I saw her. I still stand by what I said—Effie jumped off that cliff all on her own, but I can’t deny I gave her good reason to.
***
At first, Nathan wasn’t sure what had awoken him. The room was silent for a moment, and then Angel cried out. In his half-awake state, Nathan nearly dismissed it as another of Angel’s nightmares, but as she cried out again—a sound somewhere between a scream and a sob—he realized she was crying in pain.
Nathan didn’t know how he got across the room. All he knew was that one instant he was sitting straight up in bed, and the next he was standing by the door.
“Angel, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“The baby.”
Nathan froze. Angel hadn’t told him how far along she was, and he had been too preoccupied to ask. Still, he didn’t have to ask to know it was early. Far too early.
“Can you get to the door?” Nathan asked.
“I don’t think so.” Angel’s voice sounded strange—breathy and panting and sobbing.
Nathan hesitated. He knew how to bypass the lock—after all, he had made the door and latch himself. But he had never considered that he might have to force it open. In his mind, the lock was what had made their living arrangement acceptable.
Nathan’s hesitation vanished as Angel cried again, a high keening sound. In one smooth motion, he lifted the pegs holding the door in place and then walked through the door.
Angel was kneeling beside the bed, knees splayed apart, face buried in her arms. She groaned as she turned her face toward him. Nathan quickly knelt beside her, raisi
ng a hand to her forehead. It was damp, sweaty. Cold.
“How long have you been like this?” Nathan asked.
“I don’t know, a while,” Angel answered.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?” Nathan asked, his voice tense.
Angel looked at him blankly. As Nathan looked at her eyes, he saw that they were seeing, and yet not. Disoriented.
“Not good, very not good,” he muttered to himself, running his hand through his hair. “Never mind,” he assured Angel as she looked at him, confused. At his words, she seemed to relax slightly. Noticing this, he spoke again, buying himself time to think. “You’re going to be fine. Just keep breathing.”
She needed a doctor. A midwife. Someone besides Nathan. There was no way she would make the trip into town. He would have to bring someone back.
Nathan stood as the thought gave him direction.
“Don’t leave me,” Angel begged, clinging to his hand.
Nathan hesitated, dropping back to his knees to meet her gaze. He took her face between his hands, searching it earnestly, wanting to find something more than the unsettling vagueness that had overpowered the usual brightness in her eyes. As he looked into her eyes though, Angel stared straight at him and yet beyond him, and a slow understanding crept over Nathan, kindling a new fear as he realized the dullness in Angel’s eyes was due to more than her pain alone. It was a symptom of the slow ebbing of life. Nathan realized with a start that he was choosing between the possibility that if he left, Angel might die while he was gone, and the certainty that if he stayed, she would die in his arms.
There was no decision.
“I’m sorry,” Nathan said, his voice breaking as he spoke. “I’ll be back, I promise.”
Please, he prayed, please let me make it back in time.
***
“Davis!” Nathan bellowed, his fist pounding frantically on the heavy door.
Nathan nearly struck the doctor as the door opened in midswing. The doctor froze, eyeing Nathan’s fist, which had stopped inches from his face. Nathan slowly lowered his hand, and Ian Davis said, “What is it, Nathan? It’s the middle of the night.”
“It’s Angel. She’s . . . she’s pregnant, but something is wrong and she’s having the baby and I don’t know exactly how far along she is but I know it’s early.”
Davis didn’t speak, but Nathan read the doctor’s expression. “It’s not mine,” Nathan said hotly, causing the doctor to smirk.
“But you wish it was.” The doctor’s statement was not a question, and Nathan’s eyes narrowed. He placed a palm on the doorjamb, at the same height as Ian Davis’s head, and leaned in closer.
“Don’t push me, Davis,” Nathan snarled.
The doctor averted his eyes. “I don’t know, Nathan. It’s not my place to be involved in this.”
Nathan clenched his hands, gritting his teeth. “Involved in what? No. Never mind. That’s not important right now. You are a doctor. How is it not your place?”
The doctor was silent. Nathan was growing more desperate with each second that passed.
“You owe me, Davis,” he said quietly. The doctor raised his eyes to meet Nathan’s. They were narrowed in understanding, but Nathan kept speaking, driving his words with a force he hoped would make the doctor hear them. “You owe me,” he repeated, “for nine years ago when I got bucked off that ‘horse.’ But of course you know there was no horse. You knew my father beat me within an inch of my life, and you did nothing. Just a quick, ‘Good luck, son,’ and you were on your way.”
The doctor’s face flushed, and again he refused to meet Nathan’s eyes.
“You owe me,” Nathan repeated once more, quietly. Desperately.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” a soft female voice interrupted, “but this does seem to be a rather silly conversation. Of course, Ian will go, won’t you, dear?”
Nelle had appeared.
The doctor’s gaze flew to his wife.
Nelle looked at him solemnly. “My dear, I love you, but sometimes you worry far too much about the wrong things. You are, after all, a doctor, and what sort of doctor, when he is able, does not go when he is called?”
***
The trip back to the cabin was at once a blur and painfully slow. Strange details stood out in Nathan’s mind, like the way the moonlight filtered oddly down through the dwindling clouds and the last straggling snowflakes that seemed to appear out of midair. And yet, much like he couldn’t remember crossing the room to Angel’s door, he couldn’t remember traveling back from town to the cabin.
He remembered the moment the cabin came into view, and pushing the cabin door open, and walking through the door to Angel’s room, and meeting her eyes. Opening his mouth to speak, to reassure her.
And then the doctor pushed by Nathan, his initial reluctance to act now outweighed by sheer force of habit. The doctor motioned to Nathan, and together they lifted Angel from her position on the floor and laid her on the bed. Nathan’s insides clenched as Angel cried out again. He found himself kneeling beside the bed, vaguely aware that Angel was holding his hand so tightly it hurt, and surprised she had the strength to do so.
The minutes dragged on like hours. In the back of his mind, Nathan knew he should have been exhausted, and yet he wasn’t sure he could even blink. He felt like the anxiety was pumping through his veins. It was like the sharp, uncomfortable jolt of a tree branch giving way beneath him, except the feeling was constant. Every muscle in his body was tensed.
And then something changed. The doctor shifted, relaxed almost imperceptibly. Somehow, Angel seemed to know her work was almost done and, in spite of everything, seemed in control for the first time since Nathan had woken that night. Nathan held his breath.
Everything happened all at once. Angel cried out once more, and the baby came out. The doctor looked relieved, then troubled, and then there was silence. The baby did not cry.
As soon as the baby came out—limp and gray, with the cord wrapped around its neck—Nathan knew it was dead. The blow of that realization struck Nathan with more force than any that had been laid on him by his father’s hand. A boy, Nathan saw. The baby had been a boy.
Nathan felt sick to his stomach, a sensation that worsened as he forced himself to meet Angel’s eyes and he realized she already knew. Grief twisted her face, whitened with exhaustion and blood loss.
And the blood. There was so much blood.
***
Angel was finally asleep. The doctor turned to Nathan, and for once, Nathan knew he spoke with sincerity. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Despite the doctor’s earnestness, Nathan couldn’t reply. There was nothing to say. So, he merely held out his hand. The doctor gripped Nathan’s hand tightly, and they shook.
“Keep her warm,” Ian instructed. “She’s lost a lot of blood, but she should be okay. We’re lucky I had the ergot to stop the bleeding—there’s nothing I would have been able to do otherwise.”
He hesitated, then added, “I am a coward at heart, Nathan. You knew that nine years ago. I wish I had come sooner to help Angel, right when you asked—”
“Would it have made a difference?” Nathan asked bluntly, too tired to be tactful.
There was a long pause, then the doctor answered, “No,” and Nathan knew he spoke without guile. There was nothing more that could have been done.
Nathan nodded mutely, and after one last glance, the doctor released his hand and walked toward the door.
“Davis,” Nathan said as the doctor reached the door, and he paused. “You did come, and I’m grateful for that.”
Ian Davis met Nathan’s eyes, then nodded. “Good luck, Nathan. To you and Angel both.”
Then, he touched his hat and was gone.
The silence that followed was overwhelming. Nathan did not know what to do, and he found himself walking back and forth across the front room of the cabin. He was exhausted, but he didn’t know whether he should sit with Angel, or leave her to rest, or sit with her while
she rested.
It was his exhaustion that finally made the decision. Nathan lay in bed and fell asleep almost immediately, but his sleep was restless, filled with tossing and turning. When morning finally came, he grudgingly rolled out of bed, not feeling any more rested than he had when he had first lain down.
Nathan laid a piece of firewood on the coals left over from the night before. Sparks leapt from the burned wood as he scraped the cold ashes away. The new wood began smoking, the splinters nearest the hot coals darkening, and then a small flame licked its way out from underneath the kindling. Nathan glanced at Angel’s door. It was open—the door still leaned against the wall where Nathan had set it after he had taken it down the night before.
Nathan hesitated, unsure whether he should leave Angel be or check on her, but as he hesitated, he heard a soft knock on the door. In his sleep-deprived state, Nathan foggily wondered whether the doctor had forgotten something, but when he opened the door, Olivia stood in front of him.
“How did you know?” Nathan asked, flabbergasted.
“Nelle,” Olivia said simply.
Nathan stared at her, stunned. Never before in his life had he been so grateful to see Olivia.
“Is she awake?” Olivia asked.
Nathan shook his head mutely.
Olivia nodded, sitting down at the table as she did so. “You go about your business, Nathan,” she said firmly. “I can take care of myself. I’ll just wait here until she wakes up.”
For a while, Nathan hovered in the front room, unsure of what to do and hoping Angel would wake. When she did not, and Olivia continued to sit silently at the table, Nathan finally gave up and left to milk the cow.
***
As soon as Nathan left, Olivia rose from her spot at the table and walked to the doorless room.
“I know you’re awake, dear,” she said softly. “May I come in?”
Angel rolled over in bed to look at Olivia with red eyes and a tear-streaked face, then shrugged. She thought she should feel grateful that Olivia had come, but as hard as she tried, she could not bring herself to feel anything other than misery and overwhelming guilt. Angel mourned the loss of the tiny life that had grown inside her. It was a life she had never asked for, or wished for. One she had been terrified of. And yet she found herself grieving.
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