“I promised to love him in sickness and in health,” she said after a moment, then bit her lip again, like she was trying not to cry.
He waited, letting her process.
“When Lee passed, and I got back here with Dove,” she said softly after a moment. “That first night, I was so happy to be back with my parents and finished takingcare of Lee and Dove by myself that I just lay in my bed and cried like a baby. I felt like the weight of the world was off my shoulders. What kind of wife would feel that way?”
Dalton figured probably any person alive would be relieved to be out from under such a terrible responsibility. Ella had been overwhelmed. It was natural to be happy to have family near at last.
But telling her that wouldn’t help her, and he knew it. The woman held herself to an impossible standard. He understood that now and it made sense of so many things he’d seen since he arrived, so many sacrifices she made every day for her daughter and her parents.
“Would you have done anything differently for Lee?” Dalton asked her plainly. “If you hadn’t felt angry and overwhelmed? Is there any action you would have taken that you didn’t?”
Her eyes flashed to his in confusion.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean did you ignore him when he needed your help?” he asked. “Did you not go to him when he called for you?”
She shook her head mutely, eyes widening like she was horrified.
“So you did everything you promised to do,” he said gently. “You cared for him, you talked to him, you sat with him. You gave him all you had?”
She nodded, her eyes serious.
“You’re right, you promised to love him, Ella,” Dalton said firmly. “Andthat’s love.”
Tears sprang up in her eyes and he almost couldn’tcontinue, but he knew he had to. He had to make sure she understood.
“You put his comfort over your own, and you cared for him all the way to the end,” he went on. “That’s exactly what love is. Anyone can show their love when everything is sunshine and roses. That’s easy. You did it when things got tough, and that’s when it matters most. You never made any promises about how loving him would make youfeel. That’s not a promise anyone can make, becausenone of uscan predict how hard times will impact our outlook. But it doesn’t matter how you felt, it’s what youdidthat matters. I know Andy agreed with me about that, and if he was the kind of man you say he was, then Lee would, too.”
Ella seemed to almost freeze in place for a moment before looking away and inhaling through her nose.
Maybe his words were landing, giving her some kind of alternate perspective. Or maybe that was just cruel hope coloring what Dalton saw. He was past trying to convince her to care for him now. He could let her go if he had to. He just wanted to take away a layer of her pain.
“I think I need a few minutes by myself,” Ella said softly.
She leaned back against the barn, looking out over the snowy fields before closing her eyes, as if she were praying or maybe remembering.
It hurt his soul to do it, but he nodded once and headed back toward the house to give her the space she needed, his boots feeling as heavy as his heart.
18
ELLA
Ella stood just under the overhang of the barn roof, watching the snow fall over the farm for a long time, her heart feeling ripped wide open all over again as she relived the most terrible days of her life.
But this time, instead of dwelling on her anger and exhaustion, she was replaying her actions.
She watched as her former self slid out of bed again and again, hair tangled and sweaty from the hormonal shifts of new motherhood. She knew that days had passed with full sunlight, but all her memories of that time were in the dark of night, or that endless gray pre-twilight when both Lee and Dove were always miserable, and when Ella thought that the sleep she craved more than oxygen might never come.
Even now, when she closed her eyes, she could still hear Dove’s frantic squawking cries, followed by Lee’s low groan. How she had wished the baby could wake morequietly so that she only had one needy soul to comfort at a time.
But looking back, she saw herself, with the baby at her breast, rubbing her husband’s back until he drifted into a fitful sleep again. Every movement of her hand, and every beat of her heart filled with a love so deep that she hadn’t even needed to be aware of it to care for them both with everything she had, over the screams of her own mind and body for peace.
I kept my promise. I loved him the very best I could.
How had it taken someone she barely knew to point that out?
Maybe he knows me a lot better than I thought…
