Alexei narrowed his eyes again. “I know enough to understand you’re being a hypocrite.”
“I’m no such thing.”
“No? So tell me, did you prevent Bryony from being abducted by the Tlingit warriors who found her in the forest gathering wood?”
He stiffened. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“You love her, probably more than you love the rest of us, but this morning I heard her tell what happened on the expedition. It sounded like she needed help. A lot of help. With catching food. With getting away from the Tlingit. With getting pulled out of the Iskut River and warding off hypothermia afterward.”
Every muscle in Mikhail’s body grew inexplicably tense. “What’s your point?”
“How many times has this woman that you love deeply needed your help over the past few weeks? How many times did you give it? Does her helplessness make her any less of a person in your eyes? Does it make her any less deserving of your love?”
A lump formed in his throat.
“Or even more, does it make her less of a person in God’s eyes? Is she somehow not worthy of being one of his children because she needed extra help in the wilderness?”
His eyes felt hot and gritty, as though a fistful of sand had ended up inside them. “Of course not. That’s ridiculous.”
“Then why are you so convinced that needing help or asking for it—or depending on anyone else, even God—makes you less of a person?”
He had no words. Not a single one.
“I might not know what it is to be married, but I certainly know what it is to love a woman. And if the years since Clarise left have taught me anything, it’s this. God’s grace is sufficient for me, and my strength is made perfect in weakness. That’s from Second Corinthians twelve, verse nine, by the way. I would tell you to read it, but you can’t. And I only found that out yesterday, because you’ve been too stubborn and prideful to ask for help with reading for the past two decades.”
“That’s not true. I asked Kate to help me.”
“Really? Did you?Askfor Kate’s help, I mean? Were you humble enough to reach out to her and get help with your problem? Or did she figure out your word blindness on her own and then browbeat you into taking her help? That’s the only reason you published those articles for the newspaper two years ago, isn’t it? She probably forced you into letting her help.”
Mikhail pressed his mouth shut. There was no point in arguing. Alexei was right. About Kate. About his word blindness. About Bryony. About all of it.
“So as much as I hate that you’re stuck in this jail cell, charged with something you didn’t do, maybe this is exactly what God wants for you right now. Maybe you need to learn how to humble yourself and be weak and ask for help before you’re truly ready to love that sweet woman staying at our house the way she deserves to be loved.”
Alexei stood there for a moment, almost as though waiting for some type of response. But Mikhail had nothing other than that thick lump still lodged in the center of his throat.
His brother kept staring, though, waiting for something he had no response to.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Mikhail,” Alexei finally said. Then he turned and stalked off without so much as a glance over his shoulder.
His brother would probably stop and come back—if he asked him to. Would probably stand there for hours helping to plan a detailed way to either get his case thrown out or get him acquitted and then take the plan back to Evelina.
But the words wouldn’t come. Not even as Alexei opened the door that separated the jailhouse from the guardroom, then let it slam shut behind him.
37
Mikhail had found himself trapped in his share of miserable places over the years: at a desk in the office above the trading post trying to do paperwork, in school trying to read a book while words danced around the page, at one of Alexei’s fancy dinners where he tried to woo bureaucrats, and, well, any other number of places where he was indoors and forced to sit still.
But a courtroom had to be the worst.
There was something innately intimidating about a judge with serious eyes scowling down at them behind a bench that was higher than every other person in the room.
It didn’t help that the judge had delayed the hearing for two hours that morning either.
Maybe he would have been less nervous if the judge seated behind the bench today was the same judge who’d presided over the courts in Alaska for the past twenty years. But no one knew what to expect from this new judge, who’d been sent not from Seattle or San Francisco but clear over from Washington, DC.
Mikhail shifted against the hard wooden chair where he sat. That probably didn’t fall in his favor. The man was surely used to siding with the government in cases like this. He might take one look at the notes from Marshal Hibbs’s investigation and decide right then and there that the case should go to trial.
Evelina didn’t seem to know how to take the man’s silence as he pored over the case notes. She fidgeted with the papers in front of her and kept smoothing the folds of her skirt, her fingers pressing out imaginary creases over and over. Every few seconds, she glanced toward the judge, then away again, her lips parting as if she wanted to speak but thought better of it each time.
