The door clicked shut behind him, muffling their words.
Thomas scratched his head, then glanced at his daughters finishing up their breakfast. “I’m going outside with the girls for a bit,” he called through the door.
He doubted the women would stop chatting long enough to hear him, but after the fire last night, he wasn’t going to complain about his wife having companionship. She needed it from somewhere—since she was so all-fired determined not to get any from him.
“I think it was my lamp.” Jessalyn looked through the window at the pile of rubble that had been her shop not even a day ago. Her children played with the Oaktons while Thomas, Isaac, and Mac shoveled debris into a wagon with its wheels removed and sleigh tracks added to the bottom for winter.
“Your lamp?” Tressa patted Sarah’s small back, though the babe slept soundly in her arms. “What do you mean by that?”
Jessalyn rubbed her forehead. “Last night Isaac and Thomas were talking about how the fire probably started with the woodstove. I know my shop is cluttered, but I always kept clothing away from the stove, and the wall behind it is stone. There was nothing near enough to catch fire. But my lamp…”
She didn’t remember turning the wick down. She’d carried one upstairs to bed with her, but what about the one she kept on the shelf above her sewing machine? Had she left it burning?
She stepped away from the window and sank onto the sofa. “It probably serves me right. Here I am telling Thomas I don’t need his money or his help. But the truth is, I’m exhausted. I’m too busy to know which way is up or down, my pile of work only seems to grow despite how many hours I work in a day, and I never have time to spend with the girls while Thomas…” She thrust her hand toward the window that neither she nor Tressa could see out of. “Thomas is always with the girls.”
Tressa sat on the couch beside her. “Do you have a problem with him spending time with them?”
Yes. No. She didn’t know. All she knew was that her life had been going along smoothly until he arrived.
Or had it? Because whether Thomas was in Eagle Harbor or South Dakota, she still didn’t have time for the girls—or hadn’t until last night’s fire destroyed the piles of work waiting. And not just piles of work waiting for her, but piles waiting for Ruby Spritzer and Aileen Brogan too.
Before, she’d always been able to blame Thomas for her lack. He’d been the one to leave her, and she hadn’t gotten any money from him, which meant she needed to provide for the girls and herself.
She’d provided for them ten times over.
But as for being a mother to them? Olivia cooked dinner most nights and got her younger sisters up and ready for school. True, Jessalyn scrambled out of bed and made oatmeal for everyone before they left, but she was always too tired to remember most of it.
“I want…” Jessalyn bit the side of her lip. “I don’t know what I want anymore, besides to not go to South Dakota. But I need to tell him about the lamp. He wants to blame the woodstove, but the truth is, I was so tired after that big dinner and… other things…” Like learning about Henry stealing her letters and money. Learning about Thomas gambling away their savings. “But I had work to do, so I tried staying up, and then I forgot about the lamp, and it probably caught my papers on fire, which would have caused the clothes stacked near them to catch fire. And once that happened, there’d be no hope of putting it out.”
She swiped a tear from her eye, then held up her handkerchief and coughed up more of the black phlegm that seemed to have settled in her lungs for good. “And here I was telling Thomas I could do everything by myself and I didn’t need his help, not because I didn’t need it, but because I didn’t want it. And then I burn down my shop.”
“No one deserves to lose all that work. And everyone forgets a lantern now and again, even people who go to bed at a decent hour.” Tressa laid a hand on her shoulder, but it did little to calm her.
“I’ll admit, I didn’t know what to think of Thomas when he first came, but the more I see him…” Tressa rose to look out the window, where she could likely see the men working. “He seems sincere. Committed. I saw the two of you together at dinner last night. Honestly, if you don’t go to Deadwood with him in the spring, I think he’ll sell whatever he owns there and follow you to Chicago.”
She swallowed and looked at Tressa, her dark hair awash in light from the window. “You really think he’d do that?”
“I do. He knows he made a mistake, and he seems like he’ll stop at nothing to make it right.”
I’ll never leave you, Jessalyn.She could still picture his face in the lamplight so many years ago, the snow drifting around them in silent, gentle waves as he asked her to be his wife.I might not have a house as fine as Henry’s or a carriage as elaborate as Walter Shunk’s, but I promise I can do better than the tenements you grew up in. I promise I’ll love you and cherish you as long as I’m alive.
She could still taste the crisp winter air and feel the brush of snowflakes against her face. But his promise had only lasted for the first five years of their marriage, and even during that time, the cherishing bit had faded rather quickly.
Tressa left the window and headed toward the sofa. “I know he hurt you before. And I know it’s hard for you to open yourself up to others, even other women. For some reason, you always think everyone will hurt or betray you.”
“You wouldn’t. Mac wouldn’t. Isaac wouldn’t.”
“If Isaac, Mac, and I are the only loyal people you can think up in this entire town, then that just proves my point.”
She drew a breath into her raw, swollen lungs, but managed to hold back the cough that tried following. “He wants us to have a truce and both stop thinking about the future. He wants to see if Isaac will let us stay here, and we’ll live as husband and wife until the beginning of March so we can just focus on, well, us. The girls. All the normal things married people think about, and not on what will happen once the harbor opens.”
“Married people can think about some really wonderful things.” Tressa smiled brightly, then slanted her gaze toward the bedroom door. “They get to do some of those wonderful things too, you know.”
Heat climbed into her cheeks, and she cleared her throat. “Those aren’t the kind of things we’d be focusing on. More like forgiveness. And just… getting reacquainted with each other. Letting him provide for me. Letting me have more time with the girls.”
“That still sounds wonderful, even if you won’t be tending to other aspects of marriage.” Tressa’s eyes sparkled with too much hope.
Jessalyn twisted her skirt in her hands. What made Tressa so sure good would come out of this truce and not more hurt? “I didn’t tell him yes.”
