Page 79 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Betsy fought the tears back down, finding her voice with difficulty. “You wouldn’t have signed up if I hadn’t taunted you into it.”

Ava looked at her levelly. “I wouldn’t have signed up if I hadn’t wanted to sign up.”

“But if you knew—if you had any idea—”

“Yes, yes,” said Ava, without heat. “Do me the courtesy of believing I know my own mind as well as you know yours.”

Betsy gave a hiccupping laugh. “I don’t know my mind at all anymore.”

“Ha,” said Ava. She was quiet for a moment before asking, “Was it really as bad as all that?”

“Worse.” There was a hole inside Betsy. It was like Holt’s wound, a festering abscess, only this one couldn’t be drained; it pulsed there beneath the skin, a constant pain that could be dulled only by pretending it wasn’t there. But it was. Always. “I had no idea. You were right about all of it.”

“You were right too.” Ava kept her eyes trained on the surf, not looking at Betsy. Her back was painfully straight. “I got back to Concord—and I just couldn’t make myself settle. I made myself miserable. I made everyone around me miserable too. My cousin finally told me she was sick of having my face sour her porridge, and at that rate she’d rather someone a little less acute and a little more obliging.”

Betsy had forgotten what a good mimic Ava could be. She used to have Betsy in stitches parodying the other girls in their boardinghouse. It had been a long time since they’d laughed together like that. A long time since everything.

“What did you do?” she asked hoarsely.

Ava quirked a dark brow. “I found another cousin to tend to her. If there’s one thing with which I’m well-endowed, it’s an embarrassment of relations.”

Betsy stared down at the stained fabric of her apron, like a blotted copybook, all her mistakes written on her for anyone to see. “I didn’t mean to make you lose your position.”

“I made me lose my position,” said Ava firmly. “I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I wasn’t suited to it. You were right about that too. So I went home—and when I heard that the DAR was paying women to train as nurses and come to Cuba . . .”

Betsy risked a wobbly grin. “They must not have been able to teach you much. You’d done the course already.”

“There’s always something to learn,” said Ava, sounding entirely like her old self again.

Betsy blinked hard. “I thought I’d ruined everything forever.”

“It wasn’t you. Well, it wasn’t all you. I was jealous,” Ava said gruffly. “And guilty.”

“Guilty? For taking the ticket?”

“No. About your father.” Ava sat up a little straighter, with the air of one determined to make a clean breast. “That night he took us to dinner in Northampton. There was a rattle in his breathing I didn’t like. I should have said something. I knew I should say something. But I was afraid he wouldn’t take me seriously. Or that I was wrong. What did I know? I wasn’t even a medical student, just a girl who liked to tag along on her father’s house calls. So I didn’t say anything. And he died.”

“But—” It wasn’t Ava’s fault; it was Betsy’s.

Ava clasped her hands together in her lap, the knuckles very white. “You were supposed to have gone to Greece with your father. You’d been planning it for as long as I’d known you. If I’d said something that night in Northampton—”

“I killed him,” Betsy blurted out. That’s what Alex had told her. She’d killed their father just like she’d killed their mother. She ruined everything she touched. Thoughtless, careless, selfish. “It wasn’t you. I killed him by dragging him out to Northampton in the dead of winter.”

Ava turned and stared at her, her dark brows drawing together. “He had pneumonia. It was already in his lungs by the time he took the train to Northampton. I heard it.” Ava’s face was as stern and unwavering as a mask from a Greek tragedy. “His death is on my conscience, not yours. In Greece—how could I accept your charity? I could barely look at you.”

Betsy couldn’t make sense of it, of any of it. She felt as though the world had flipped on its head. “I didn’t know.”

“I was jealous too. I was jealous of you and jealous of your new friends. That just made the guilt worse,” Ava added, with clinical detachment. “I thought you’d hate me if you knew I could have saved your father and didn’t. And even if you didn’t hate me, you’d be bored of me.”

“How could I ever be bored of you? No one takes me to bits and puts me back together again the way you do.” Betsy looked at Ava, biting hard on her lower lip. “I thought you were appalled by me.”

“I was,” said Ava honestly. “But also jealous. And guilty.”

They sat there together in silence, their shoulders touching, letting themselves lean into each other as the darkness of the sky lightened into dawn. Ava didn’t hug. Ava never hugged. But it was enough.

“I don’t want you to die.”

“I don’t want me to die either,” said Ava briskly, standing up. “And I don’t intend to. Not now, at any rate. Come. We came here to work, not paint watercolors of pretty prospects.”