“Or someone. Do we even know if she’s still alive? This Merryn?”
She blows out a breath. “Enough about Merryn and Covington.”
His throat closes up as she sits sideways on one of the old chairs and brings it up close to him so their knees are touching.
“It’s you I want to know about.”
He cannot swallow. He tries.
“You’ve given me more holes than story, and I’ve not stopped thinking about it.”
“N-n-n-n-n-no. I sh-sh-shouldn’t have said anything b-before.”
She crosses her ankles and tucks them beneath the chair, leaning forward. “You owe me.”
He holds her stare, unable to look away. Wishing he could shove his chair back—way back—without seeming rude.
Finally she drops her gaze. “I had a fiancé once. I know, hard to imagine I snagged a man, eh? An airman by the name of Sammy. Lieutenant Sam Carmichael. He left right after our betrothal, and he promised five ways from Sunday he’d be back, so I waited. I wrote him and I painted, waiting for peace to break so we could be married.”
“He…he didn’t come back?”
“Oh, he came back.” She spins her hair around her finger. “The shell of him, leastwise. The rest of him died on the battlefield with his mates.”
William grips the stool and glances away. He feels the truth of those words deeply.
“Wouldn’t tell me a blamed thing, but he wasn’t the same. His mum told me later he had nightmares, and he ran screaming out of the house once, in the middle of a snowstorm.” Her slender arms tremble. “He’d snap at me for every little thing. ’Twas a wretched time, that. I thought he’d found some foreigntart and had a mind tomakeme break it off, but I wouldn’t. I’m that much a fool.”
“You’re loyal.”
This draws a sad half smile from her.
“Anyway, go on.”
“Eventually I put the pieces together and realized what the battles had done to him. He was always a sensitive bloke, my Sammy. People walking all over him, leaving their footprints on his soul.” She shakes her head. “Should have seen it. Should have known how deeply the war had broken him.”
His toes curl in his too-big work boots. “Couldn’t you…go to him? Tell him you understand?” Or is that too difficult? Too impossible? Suddenly lightheaded, he glances at the pile of smashed pottery that will never be fully repaired again. Half of it is dust. What is broken cannot be unbroken. It’s never the same again. “He…he might not know. That you still love him, I mean. You should go to him.”
She gives a short laugh. “Maybe, when he’s released from St. Lawrence’s.”
His breath stops. “Oh.” An asylum isn’t the sort of hospital a person recovers from.
She leans forward. “See here, I’m only telling you this because…well, because I know that look you wear. The broken and lost one. The look of a body who hasn’t slept in a hundred years because resting might just be…”
He drops his gaze, a rock in his chest.
“No one understands. No one—but you. Will you visit him? That’s my favor.”
He widens his stance and leans his elbows on his knees. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Who better to reach him than you?”
His shoulder tics. “I’m not exactly a prime example of healing.”
She pauses for a moment. “You’re more alive than he is.”
He just stares at that broken jar.
“You men should know,” she says quietly, “that the women you love wear your pain too. We feel it, because our souls are still connected to yours. And we only want to…to…Look—you talk to him, and I’ll speak with your wife. I’m jolly good at patching things over.”
