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“I’m sorry,” he said.
She pressed her hands around the cool mug. Her jaw clenched so hard that her head ached. “For what?” she managed to ask.
Please don
’t know the truth.
He bowed his head as if he didn’t want to speak. “It didn’t come to me ’til I was halfway over the Sierras. Until I’d been alone a good long while.”
Please don’t know.
“I thought about some man hurting you, about the way it happened…”
No.
“I thought of someone hurting you, and Jess…how could I hate you for that?”
What did that mean? “As you pointed out,” she said past numb lips, “I chose it.”
“But you were right. What you said. You might have done something bad, but you were scared. Desperate. What I did was just…just to pass the time. And I did it to some woman just as desperate as you. Some woman trying to stay alive and fed. It didn’t matter to me why she let me.”
Jess could feel that this was something good. Something she’d never expected to hear, from him or anyone else. Someday maybe she’d be thankful for it. But right now it felt threatening, a hope she didn’t want to believe in and didn’t want to know. Was that all he’d come back for?
“All right,” she murmured, “thank you for coming to tell me that.”
“Jessica…” The solemn weight of her name pressed the threat harder against her heart.
“It was kind of you.” She pushed to her feet so quickly she felt dizzy. “Gracious.”
“Jess.” He sprang to his feet too, his hat falling to the floor. She stared down at it, watching to make sure his foot didn’t shift and crush it.
“Your hat,” she said as her ears buzzed with fear.
He stepped forward, his boot nudging the hat a few inches to the side. “Even when I was trying to hate you, I still loved you.”
Those words snapped her from her shock. She tore her gaze from his hat and shook her head. “No.”
“It’s true.” He touched her chin, and she watched him, trying to find the lie in his precious face, in the hard lines of his mouth and jaw and nose.
But his eyes weren’t hard anymore. They were pleading. “I needed what we did to feel wrong. I wanted to make you experience that. But it was beautiful. It felt like you, Jess. I’m sorry if I made you feel wrong.”
Her eyes welled up. One hot tear spilled onto her cheek. He caught it with his thumb.
“I wanted to hurt you,” he said.
She swallowed hard, but more tears escaped. “I know.”
“I’m so sorry for that. And I’m sorry I left you two years ago. I should have stayed and married you. I should have been brave enough to ask for what we both wanted.”
Her throat closed up. That was all she’d ever needed. For him to say they belonged together. For him to stay with her. To not have left her. She hadn’t needed him to be someone else, just himself. And now it was too late.
“I was angry,” he said. “I thought I was doing it all for you. And then when I heard your father had died I took on work I shouldn’t have. I wanted money quickly, so I became muscle for the bosses, breaking heads of organizers or hunting down people who’d stolen from the mine. It was ugly, and I blamed that on you, too, I think.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered automatically, but he shook his head.
“You never asked me to do any of it. Don’t apologize. That’s not what I came here for.”
She swallowed hard again, clearing just enough of her throat that she could whisper. “I can’t give you anything else, Caleb.”
