“Why didn't you tell me?”
“I was so focused on protecting her reputation, I couldn't think past that to anything else. I was afraid if I told a single person, it would open a Pandora's Box and lead to her ruin.”
“That's no excuse. I would have kept her secret, and you know it.”
“I reached the same conclusion, but when I tried to... there was never a good time.”
“You should have told me. If you had, I wouldn't have spent the last six years hating myself.”
“Hating yourself? Why?”
“For thinking you loved me. For being a fool and not seeing that you loved my sister instead.”
“But that wasn't the truth.”
“In the absence of another reason, what else was I supposed to think?”
Jackson stood mute, his voice—his very breath—choked by crippling regret.
After Caroline’s father had announced the engagement, and she’d fled, he’d stood by the window overlooking the garden and heard the faint echo of stifled sobs. The words were nearly to his lips to excuse himself from the room, when the hopelessness of the situation threw his mind into a violent waking dream of the ambush that had nearly cost him his leg.
He'd gripped the sill and prayed no one would see him sweat and shake. Caroline wasn’t a threat, but her garden had morphed into a Gettysburg field full of lurking enemies. By the time he’d forced his mind back to reality, he was afraid to step foot outside, afraid the smell of dirt and brush would throw him into the nightmare all over again.
Jackson despised the hold the war had on him.
He hated that it had turned him into a coward.
He regretted most of all that this ill-named ‘Soldier’s Heart’ had incapacitated him at a critical moment and hurt his precious Caroline. He hadn’t forced himself to go to her, hadn’t looked her in the eye and explained. Now, he’d spend the rest of his life wishing he had.
She glared at him with eyes full of resentment and pain. “I fully expected you to come out of my father’s study andannounce your engagement tome. Instead, you chose Amanda. And all you told me—all either of you told me—was that you were sorry.”
“We were. I am.”
“Well, sorry’s not enough. I lay awake every night formonths, wondering if I’d gone mad. I endured countless torturous hours, wondering if I’d imagined the affection between us, imagined the way you looked at me when you came home from the war.
“You hurtme, Jackson. Youbroke my heart. I have never felt so betrayed and so abandoned as I did the day you married my sister instead of me.”
Jackson’s throat closed up, and his chest burned with shame at the depth of pain he’d inflicted. He blinked back tears of his own as he stared at the ones filling Caroline’s eyes. When he finally got his voice to work, it was low and rough. “I tried to tell you before I left, when we were standing by the coach, but you refused to even let me say goodbye.”
“You could have told me in a letter,” she replied in a voice that was as broken as his.
“I couldn’t risk it falling into the wrong hands. I hated leaving things that way, but I truly thought you’d figure it out, and I told myself you’d get over me sooner if I left you alone.”
“I’ll never get over you, as long as I live,” Caroline said in a low, anguished voice hardened by anger. “You did the honorable thing when it came to my sister, but you destroyed me.”
She turned and strode away, leaving a void that sucked the air from his lungs.
Caroline fled the barn and ran all the way to the house. She couldn’t stay at Jackson’s any longer. Being near him hurt too much.
She came upon Celia in the kitchen, chopping potatoes. “I need a favor,” she said, pasting on a smile and swiping the moisture from under her eyes.
Celia’s hands stilled as soon she looked Caroline full in the face. “I’ll oblige if I can.”
“May I ride with you to town?”
“Of course, you may.” She narrowed her eyes. “Those tears are not the kind shed over a grave. Does Missa Maguire need a sound thrashin’?”
A chuckle burst forth on a hiccup. “Maybe, but I don’t think it would do any good.”
