“Maybe I’m so used to doing things myself, I don’t know how to stop.” She bit the side of her lip, her eyes searching his, so open and trustful beneath the moonlight that he almost couldn’t hold her gaze. “We should go to the bakery together sometime, like you said.”
Yes. Tomorrow. First thing in the morning.He opened his mouth to agree, yet he couldn’t quite form the words, not with her looking at him like that.
“There’s something I have to tell you.” He couldn’t stand here and listen to her open up about Henry without being fully honest with her in return. “I’m not sure whether I should have explained when I first arrived or not. I prayed for guidance, but I still don’t know the best way to go about it.”
Probably because there was no good way for a man to tell his wife he’d deceived her.
“Were you unfaithful to me?” she whispered into the night. “I know what kind of women live in mining towns, and…”
He reached out and clasped her hand in his. “Not in the way you mean, but I was unfaithful in another way. With our savings. Before I left.”
Furrows rifted her delicate brow. “I don’t understand.”
“I gambled it, Jess. I never invested it in that copper mine. I was going to invest it like we talked about, and I took that trip down to Calumet to do just that, but once I was there…” He still remembered walking into the gambling hall, the scent of spirits and tobacco, the rowdy laughter, the dim lighting, the scantily dressed waitresses, the hope in his belly that he could take the money they’d set aside and double it in a single night.
“No matter how hard I worked, how hard I tried saving, nothing seemed to be enough for you.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “I’d go home, exhausted and tired after a day on the docks, only to find you disappointed that a final ship hadn’t come into the harbor so I could earn extra money. You insisted we save money every week, but that left us eating naught but porridge and beans and bread. Doubling our savings and bringing it back to you sure seemed like a good way to keep you happy. I figured maybe if you were happy, I could be happy again, and we’d remember how to be happy together, and…”
He was rambling now, but she’d made no effort to stop him, just stood there with a devastated look on her face, the moonlight that had been so kind to her a few moments ago now illuminating her hurt and disappointment.
He shoved his hand into his pocket, and it clenched around an errant scrap of paper it found. “Yeah, foolish, I know. Like you said last week, money wouldn’t have solved our problems, not when there were so many other things wrong between the two of us. The sad thing is, for a long time part of me still thought about what might have happened if gambling had worked.”
Maybe her silence was good. At least she hadn’t started shouting. And she hadn’t thrown up her hands and run off theporch either, or told him she’d never talk to him again. All she did was take her hand from his grasp—and he couldn’t blame her.
“But this past spring, I realized I was glad I lost that money straight off. If gambling would have worked, well, I’d have tried again. And again. And again. I’d have never kept a dime in our pockets. There are enough gambling dens in Deadwood for me to see the pattern.” He’d have turned into his brother in Cornwall.
“Still, I’m sorry I took the money and gambled with it. I always imagined you suspected something. There were only two weeks between when I took it with the intention of investing and when I told you it was gone. No mine plays out that quick.” He finally clamped his mouth shut and looked at her, waiting for her to say something, anything that would end her silence.
She swiped a strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear, then looked at the porch floorboards. “I didn’t think about it that much, I suppose.” Her voice held a slight tremble. “Only about how the money was gone and we had next to nothing. We had two daughters, and I didn’t want to end up back in the tenements.”
“I wrote the story to you in a letter. In some ways I feel like I’ve already told you once.” What Henry must have thought when he’d read that. The do-nothing immigrant from Cornwall had failed and couldn’t provide for Jessalyn.
But then, that wasn’t so different from spending his childhood as the do-nothing son of the town drunk. Seemed the lot he’d been given at birth was sticking to him no matter how hard he tried to run from it. And now he didn’t even have the strength to work as a miner or toss crates around Henry’s warehouse or haul his father home after a brawl.
“I also figured that was part of the reason you wouldn’t write me back. I didn’t…” His throat closed, and he cleared it beforetrying again. “I didn’t even put together that you didn’t know about the gambling until I got here and saw for myself how much Henry stole from us. It went far beyond money, angel.”
Her head shot up, her eyes glassy in the darkness. “Don’t call me that.”
He didn’t need to ask why, not with the way he’d once used the name for her. Did it matter that it was the only thing he wanted to call her? She still looked like an angel to him, even if she was a fierce, injured one rather than a sweet, loving one.
“This was why you wanted to meet with me at the bakery, wasn’t it? Not to build a relationship as much as to tell me this. Except it wouldn’t have…” She pressed a hand over her mouth, but that didn’t stop the tears from streaking down her cheeks to plop onto her coat.
“Both, Jess. I wanted to tell you, yes, and start rebuilding our relationship.”
She shook her head. “It’s impossible. I don’t know how I can trust you again. Ever.”
She didn’t mean it. She couldn’t. She’d just offered to meet him at the bakery a quarter hour ago. Surely if she could trust him enough to overcome how he’d never set aside his work to come collect her and the girls himself, then they could work through something that took place half a decade back. He took a step forward, his hands clenching in his pockets. “I’ve changed since then. That’s part of the reason I came back for you. Part of the reason I’m staying here all winter, even though there’s a hotel in Deadwood I need to get back to.”
“Don’t stay here on account of us.” She sniffled and wiped her tears with her hands. “Please. You won’t get what you want in the end. Come spring, the girls and I are going to Chicago regardless of what you decide to do. You should just leave now, before we get more snow. There’s not even enough on the ground for snowshoes yet. You should be able to walk to Calumetwithout incident. Besides, I wouldn’t want your hotel to suffer because you’re not there.”
“I already told you, if I go, you’re going with me.” His voice shook with frustration. He wasn’t going to give up on his wife and daughters because of a mistake he’d made five years ago.
“No, Thomas, I’m not. And staying here all winter isn’t going to change that.”
The way she said his name, so clinical and methodical, without any hint of emotion, caused him to take a step back. He was losing her, he could feel it in the way her eyes took on that detached glint, see it in the way her face had transformed from that of a lovely angel to a hurt one to a stone one. “Jess, can’t you?—”
“You have a hotel in South Dakota, yes?”
He nodded.
