What would she say when she saw all of it? That it was hideous? That she wanted nothing to do with him?
No, she’d never say something like that, not years ago when they’d first met, and certainly not now. She’d always been the person who saw him as more than the son of the town drunk or replaceable immigrant riffraff.
So why couldn’t he make himself take his arm out of his undergarment? If he wanted to build a new life with her, then he needed to show her his scars—and not just the ones that puckered his skin, but the ones that marred the fabric of their tattered relationship as well.
He slowly pulled his arm from the flannel, wincing at the movement in his shoulder.
A thick silence crept into the room, and he raised his gaze to his wife’s. She stood in the shadowy flicker of the lantern, stillness surrounding her as she pressed a hand to her mouth.
“You almost died, didn’t you?” Tears glittered in her eyes. “I almost lost you for good.”
“You’d already lost me, Jess.” His voice was low and gravelly in the small room. Once his hotel was up and running, he hadn’t been able to walk away from the money it brought in, not even for his family. “God had to work harder than He should have to bring me back.”
She reached out and touched the mangled skin. He rooted his feet to the ground and looked away. Did she know she was the first person to see the scar apart from a doctor? The first person to touch it besides himself and a physician, and not even he liked touching it? He gritted his teeth while her fingers ran over the angry, ridged skin that had hardened into something the doctor in Deadwood called scar tissue.
“I’m so thankful you survived.” Jessalyn’s quiet words floated into the dimness.
“It doesn’t make you loathe me?”
She blinked up at him, questions in her eyes, but once again, he couldn’t hold her gaze.
“I’m not a whole man anymore, Jess. I’m broken, scarred. I’ll never be able to work underground again.” As much as he’d grown up hating the dank, dark tunnels that yielded coal in Cornwall, he’d always had a way to provide for himself and his family. He’d always been able to put in an honest day’s work. Perhaps it was chopping away at rock with a pickax or hauling crates around Henry’s warehouse, but now he’d never be much besides a hotelier. “Even the deputy job wears on this shoulder.”
“The scar just makes me all the more grateful to have you back.”
She was grateful for him? He swallowed and brought his gaze back to meet hers. When had she changed from the woman who didn’t want to speak two words to him into one that was glad to have him around?
She pressed her palm against the injury, her fingers splaying against his shoulder. “Like Christ’s scars on his hands, this is a testament of what you’ve endured, not a reason to despise you.”
“I’m not a full man anymore. If anything happens to my hotel, I’ll never be able to earn a living underground again.”
“You’re whole, Thomas, just not perfect. But I’m hardly perfect either, and neither are the girls.” She kept her hand over the angry, puckered skin, preventing him from covering it with his union suit. “But I’m still so very sorry for everything you went through.”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing to apologize for. You were hardly responsible for that rockfall, or for the girl who went down into the shaft after she had a fight with her mother.”
“But I was the reason you were in Deadwood.”
Yes. No. Maybe.
“I suppose.” If not for her insistence that he find a better paying job, he’d probably still be swinging a pickax underground at Central every day—provided a rockfall there hadn’t killed him by now.
He smoothed a strand of gold silk behind her ear, then let his fingers linger there, in the soft place where her jaw and ear and neck met. The longer she touched him, the warmer his mangled skin turned beneath her hand, until he couldn’t stop the tingles of warmth that traveled from his shoulder to his heart.
“I’m the one in the wrong here. From the very beginning of our marriage, I’ve been wrong.” Her gaze dipped away before coming back to meet his again. “I should have tried harder with you. I should have taken time to count my blessings. I should have rejoiced in the little, good things we had together instead of always being so focused on money and not ending up back in those tenements.”
He shook his head. She made it sound as though so much of their troubles were her fault, when the blame should be laid athis feet first. “You weren’t the one to gamble away our savings. You weren’t the one to walk away and not return for five years.”
“No, but I was so focused on the size of our savings that I lost sight of the man I fell in love with—and the reasons I love him.”
The breath stilled in his lungs.Love him?Today? Not loved ten years ago or eight years ago or five years ago, but right now, this very moment?
“‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.’ Tressa told me that verse just after you returned, but I wasn’t interested in letting the Lord build our house then, just as I wasn’t interested in letting the Lord build anything before you left. I was only ever interested in what you could give me and do for me and bring me.”
She still kept her hand over his injury, half over his heart, which thudded against his ribs in jerky, sporadic bursts. “Marriage should be full of sacrifice, a picture of Christ and the church. Two people love each other enough to sacrifice their own wants and desires for the other, just like Christ sacrificed His life for believers. And yet I could never look beyond myself to make any sacrifices for you. Even now, standing here, I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done for you.”
“My trousers.” He glanced down at the pants she’d sewn for him in less than a day. “You made my trousers.”
Tears glittered in her eyes anew. “Those hardly count, not when I’ve been so scared to love you again, to let you love me, to open myself up lest you hurt me another time. But that’s all selfishness. Who comes at the front of every one of those thoughts? Me. Not the girls or you or even God. It’s all me and all about how I can protect myself from getting hurt again. But if our example of marriage is Christ and the sacrifice He made for us, then I ought not be asking how I can protect myself from those who want to love me, but what I can sacrifice for those I love.”
