Page 120 of Two Wars and a Wedding

And she’d been right, hadn’t she? The fact that he hadn’t tried to contact her was proof.

But when that man on the telephone had said to give his regards to Mr. Rutherford . . . when Betsy had seen Kit’s nauseating headline . . . Oh, it was foolish, but part of her couldn’t resist poking. Poking to see if this was, perhaps, Holt’s way of letting her know he hadn’t changed his mind, that everything he had said to her was all still true, that even after a good night’s sleep in a proper bed, even after a return to the normal world, he still saw something in her, in all her cracks and flaws. . . .

Not the Angel of the Seneca.

People need heroes, he’d told her. That was what this was about. Not about her. Not about him, not about them. It was about two fictional characters, created by the press: the legendary lawman and the angel of mercy, emblems of honor in a world seething with corruption.

Betsy swallowed her disappointment and tried to pretend that was what she was here about too, and that her motives hadn’t been low and selfish.

“I don’t care what they say about me,” Betsy lied. “But I do care about justice being done. How many men have to die before someone is held accountable? I’m sick of people shrugging and saying it’s war. What happened on the Albania wasn’t war. What happened on the Seneca wasn’t war. It was incompetence and callousness and—goodness only knows what else. I may not matter, but if I don’t speak out, it will just keep happening again and again and again.”

Holt took a step back. “Say that to the president. Say all of that to the president.”

“I will.” The words stuck in Betsy’s throat. It felt like goodbye. She wasn’t ready for it to be goodbye.

But somehow they had begun walking, walking slowly in tandem along one of the twisting paths that would lead out of the park, a sure sign this interview was over.

“Once that’s done . . . will you go to one of the army camps to nurse?” Holt asked politely. They might have been strangers, exchanging commonplaces.

“No. I only started nursing because I was angry that no one would let me excavate.” It was hard to say because it was true. And also because it meant admitting that they’d come to the end of their particular moment in time. “You took my advice. I’m taking yours. I’m going back to Greece. I’m going to get my own permit and hire my own workers and run my own dig.”

She’d thought long and hard about it during her stay at the St. Denis Hotel. This time, she was going to do it her way. No gadding about on the fringes of Athenian society, no waiting for the men at the American School to let her play with their toys.

Betsy dragged her feet along the path, scuffing the shiny toes of her new buttoned boots. “I don’t want to hunt down the relics of battles. I don’t want to discover more about the Trojan War or what exactly Hector’s armor might have looked like. I want to learn about the lives of normal people. Ordinary people. Women. I want to learn how they cooked, how they dressed, how they raised their children, how they nursed their ill. I want to dig up all the bits and pieces other archaeologists throw away, because they’re not big enough, grand enough. Shards of cooking pots and fragments of children’s toys.” Betsy stopped short, nearly causing a collision with a baby carriage. Holt moved her neatly out of the way, just in time. “Shouldn’t we want to find those? Shouldn’t that matter too?”

“Yes.” Holt leaned on his cane, looking down at her. Betsy could see the shadow of the scar at his temple, beneath his carefully combed hair. “It should.”

Betsy thought about him as she had first seen him, on that train platform outside of Tampa, among that boisterous, lively crew of new-minted soldiers, all anxious to get out there and strike a blow against the Spaniards. So many of them dead now. Or wounded.

“I don’t want anything to do with war ever again,” Betsy said vehemently. “I don’t want to study it or teach about it or live it.”

“Neither do I.” Holt turned his cane over in his hand, examining the handle. “My father always said the war was the making of him. I think it was the unmaking of him. Not that it makes him any less of an, er—um.”

Holt reddened, covering his confusion with a cough.

Betsy was afflicted with an absolutely unbearable wave of affection. “I’ve heard worse,” she said tartly. “Did you really think men deep in the throes of delirium mind their language? Even you.”

Holt groaned. “I don’t know what to say. If I’d known . . .”

“You would have guarded your tongue in your pain? It’s not your language that makes you a gentleman.” As she said it, Betsy felt the way she had when she’d first looked at her Greek letters and they’d begun to make sense in her head, as though a great truth lay before her and she finally had the skill to read it. “I’ve known so-called perfect gentlemen who don’t have a gentlemanly bone in their bodies. It’s not the language or the clothes—although that is a very nice boater.”

Holt’s hand went instinctively to his hat. “Thank you?”

“Don’t thank me. I should be thanking you—three times over, a hundred times over.” Betsy didn’t understand why she’d been too stupid to see it before. She’d been dazzled by Charles’s charm but she’d missed what was right in front of her with Holt. He wasn’t even a diamond in the rough. He was just a diamond, pure and simple. “You couldn’t stop being a gentleman if you tried. It’s your kindness. It’s the way you look out for everyone. You looked out for Paul, you looked out for me—even when I didn’t want looking after.”

“I couldn’t have let you walk in the dark to Tampa,” said Holt hoarsely. “There were alligators.”

“Do you think I didn’t notice how weak you were on the Seneca? How much your leg was hurting you? But you still did the work of ten men. You held me up even when you barely had strength to stand yourself.”

“What was I meant to do, lounge on a deck chair while you worked yourself to the bone?” Holt looked horrified by the notion. “It was what anyone would do.”

He genuinely believed that. After everything—after his father, after the army—he still believed that.

And that was why she loved him.

The realization didn’t strike like one of Cupid’s arrows. It wasn’t a blow out of the blue. It felt like looking up and realizing the sky was blue. It had always been there; she just hadn’t had the wits to see it.

He was always there, quietly, in the background, propping her up, never asking for thanks. Knowing what she needed before she knew she needed it.