She cleared her throat. “She’s not short of breath? Doesn’t tire easily?”
Cormac shook his head. “Just as you seen her. She’s about driving her brothers up a wall. But her mam and I sure are grateful, Mrs. Prentice.”
He fiddled with his net. Glanced toward the window, where his wife, in apparent exasperation, tried to stop Rosie from telling a passing couple all about her chick.
“You’ve not heard from your brother?” Cormac asked.
Charlotte’s breath hitched. “No.”
“How’re you holding up?”
Charlotte twisted a hand in her apron. No one had asked. Everyone expected her to carry on—she’d expected it herself—because that was what one did, through grief or pain or any upset at all.
Her lip trembled. “I’ll be better when he’s home.”
Ifhe came home. She dabbed at her eyes.
Cormac avoided her gaze. “Hope he’ll be all right.”
Charlotte staggered toward him. “Would you go? Would you look for him? If people knew you were going, others might—”
He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Please. I’d go myself, but there’s my—” Charlotte ground it out, unused to drawing attention to it “—my condition, and my children—”
Cormac was on his feet. “And my own children? How d’you think my Anna’d manage without me? Besides—” he raisedhis voice as Charlotte tried to object “—if I went looking for him... I can’t have folks thinking—”
“Thinking what?” Charlotte’s fist clenched on her cane. “What happened between you and my brother?”
Cormac’s ears pinkened. “Nothing.”
“I know that,” Charlotte snapped. “I mean, what happened that’s made the villagers talk as if something happened between you and my brother?”
“Nothing.” Cormac dropped back into his chair. “I taught him his way around a horse-cart, is all. Folks saw us driving together and thought there was something to it.”
Like what?Charlotte wanted to ask, but she didn’t. She wanted to tell him how kind he’d been, teaching Arthur to drive the cart, to ask him, again, to look for Arthur and convince others, but Mrs. Young stepped in.
“Mr. Neely’s outside,” she said to Cormac. “Wants a word. I told him you were engaged, but he’s awful keen if—”
“Mrs. Prentice was just leaving,” Cormac said, with a terrible air of finality. “See her out, would you?”
He stalked outside. Charlotte papered over her distress, told Mrs. Young Rosie seemed right as rain but to come up to the cottage if her symptoms reemerged, and left. The journey uphill was slow and painful, and Charlotte collapsed into her armchair the moment she made it home.
Sasha was shut away in the children’s bedroom. Jonas had put away the laundry Charlotte had left by her armchair the day before, intending to sit for only a moment. Now she was home, Jonas made her tea and brought a salve for her joints without being asked. Charlotte wanted to cry.
Jonas turned on the radio and tuned it to her favorite program. If romance novels were Arthur’s guilty pleasure,Tales of Terror from the Radio Waveswas Charlotte’s. She liked knowing that, however bad life got, at least she wasn’t trapped in aGothic mansion with a man she was both attracted to and afraid of or a becoming young woman who was secretly a hungry supernatural monster.
After the day she’d had, such things didn’t comfort her nearly as much as usual.
She wondered if this was how it would be if Arthur never returned: Jonas growing up too soon because she spent so much time exhausted and in pain that her children would have to take care of her. The way Eileen had gone after George’s death, Charlotte had been determined not to do that to her own children. But now—
Words echoed in her head, dismissive, disdainful.She could handle that and more if she’d try harder.
Her jaw clenched. She gripped Jonas’s hand.
“You take such good care of me. You’re very good to me. And I... I appreciate it.”
They reddened but nodded. “I promised Uncle Arthur.”
