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Viola ignored the pain she felt when she moved her hand and did it anyway, to brush the tears from Ruby’s face. “No—”
“Theo was only marrying me so I wouldn’t have to marry someone else,” Ruby told her.
Viola’s brows drew together. “He loved you.”
Ruby nodded. “He did, but he never should have married me.” She withdrew her hand from Viola’s. “We were just children when I forced him into the engagement.”
“Forced?” Viola frowned.
“Well, maybe not forced,” Ruby admitted. “But I pushed and pushed until he agreed, and I always told myself that he could back out at any time. Except I realize now that Theo never would have.” She shoved back the hair that had fallen into her face and looked at Viola. “He gave me an opportunity to jilt him,” she admitted. “When I arrived a few days ago, he offered to help me run off to stay with an elderly aunt of his in Scotland.”
“You didn’t go,” Viola said, wondering what that meant.
“No,” Ruby told her. “But if I had been brave enough to free him from our childish agreement, he wouldn’t have been there at the church. He wouldn’t be—” She stopped suddenly, and the tears started again.
Viola laid her hand on Ruby’s arm. “I didn’t know Theo so long, but the time I did know him? Theo wasn’t the type of man you could force.”
Ruby was looking at her through watery green eyes.
“I tried to talk him out of helping us. I threatened him, too, maybe a little, but no.” She shook her head. “It didn’t matter the danger. Theo made up his mind, and that was that. That one, he was stronger than most.”
“He was, wasn’t he?” Ruby said, wiping a tear away.
Viola took her hand again and squeezed it. “He wouldn’t want you to do this, to blame yourself. If he was at that altar, he was there by his own choosing.”
Ruby’s lips pressed together as she nodded, but at first she didn’t speak.
“I wanted someone to stop it,” Ruby whispered finally, as though this confession was almost too terrible to make. She was staring at their two hands. “I was standing there before god and our families, with Theo’s hand in mine, and the rector had just asked my intentions, and all I could think was that I wished that something would make it stop. Anything.”
Viola’s heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. She wanted to tell Ruby that what happened wasn’t her fault, that her wanting and wishing didn’t make evil grow there in that holy place. Not when the evil was inside Jack Grew. But she couldn’t find the words to say anything. She was too afraid to break the moment hanging between them.
Ruby looked at Viola through her lashes. “I wanted it to be you.”
MORE THAN ENOUGH
Ruby watched Viola’s reaction to the words that had just escaped from her mouth—the slight widening of her eyes, the panic that shifted in those violet depths—and she wondered if she had made a mistake.
She hadn’t planned on saying any of the things she’d just said to Viola. She wasn’t even sure that she’d known the truth of those words until they were already tumbling out of her mouth, changing her life and her world just by their existence.
She hadn’t wanted to marry Theo. Truth.
She’d trapped him because of her own selfishness. Another truth.
She’d stood on that holy altar, pledging her life to him before god and the world, but she’d been thinking about another. She could not deny it.
Maybe if Ruby had never been sent off to Europe, things would have been different. Maybe if she hadn’t spent months watching women who had built lives with one another, who were happy together. Not content. Not settling. Fulfilled. Together. Maybe then she could have forgotten about Viola. Perhaps she might have finally accepted Viola’s rejection back at the gala and moved on toward a happy future with Theo Barclay. But Paris had changed everything. It had shown her what was possible. It had whispered to her that Viola’s rejection had been nothing but fear.
As a journalist, her lodestar was the truth, and so she had to admit that truth now, most of all, to herself. The truth was simply this: She would have given anything right then to stop the world from spinning, to stop her life from being forced down a path she could never return from. Anything. She would have even given Theo.
Of course, desperate bargains were easy enough to stomach when they seemed impossible. It was a far different thing to face the reality. Theo was gone. She was, at least, in part to blame.
“You didn’t cause this,” Viola told her. “Nothing you did, nothing you wished for. You aren’t the reason Theo died.”
Ruby closed her eyes to hold back the tears. “I wish I could believe that.”
“Do you know how many times I’ve sat in a church, pleading?” Viola asked. “Bargaining with and begging whoever might be listening?”
Ruby shook her head. She had no idea what a girl as strong and brave as Viola would ever need to beg or bargain for.
