Page 45 of A Convenient Heart
“Why not. You’re their only daughter, aren’t you?”
She exhaled a long breath through her nose. “I am—now.”
She saw his confusion in the wrinkle of his brow.
She moved toward the table and sat down, careful not to wrinkle her skirts. “I suppose if I’m asking for there to be no secrets between us, you deserve to know.”
He took the pot off the stove and moved to the counter to pour. “I’m listening.”
She moved the papers into a stack, nervously flicking through their edges. “I had an older sister, Maisey. She was twelve when she died. She’d gone swimming in a little water hole, a pond in someone’s property, and there—” Merritt’s voice broke.
Jack moved close, setting her coffee cup on the table in front of her. He touched the back of her shoulder blade with his warm palm, and it gave her the strength to go on.
“There was a terrible accident, and she drowned.” Saying the words quickly was the only way she could get them out.
He sat down in the chair next to her, his knee pressing into her skirts. His hand closed over hers in her lap. It was only with his warmth surrounding her that she realized how cold her own skin had grown.
“My parents drowned too, in a way. They disappeared into their grief. My mother couldn’t bear to eat. My father spent hours alone in the barn.”
Merritt had been left to her own devices—a younger sister who had missed Maisey with a fierce grief that she hadn’t known how to process.
A tear slipped down her cheek, and she whisked it away before it could fall on the skirt of her dress. Tried to smile a wobbly smile. “It’s silly, I know. I remember my next birthday, after…after…” She couldn’t say the words again. “I woke feeling both excited and sad. I missed her greatly, but it was also my birthday. A day to be celebrated. But my mother couldn’t pull herself out of bed. And my father was nowhere to be found.”
There’d been no cake. No gifts.
Merritt had felt guilty for expecting anything at all. And forgotten, like she was only a shadow. The sister who’d lived but who didn’t really exist anymore.
She tipped her chin up, staying more tears by sheer strength of will. “I found solace in books,” she said. “Maisey had taught me to read. And I could slip into the pages of a book and be someone else for a while. Someone brave. Someone adventurous.” Someone wanted.
She had lost herself in books and in her studies for a long time.
“That’s why they left town, left you to become a teacher without any support.”
Jack said the words in an even tone, but she heard the underlying anger.
She finally gained the courage to look at him. His eyes were full of concern.
“It’s all right,” she told him. “I have my cousins, and friends in town. And you. I don’t mind that my parents can’t return for the wedding.”
Thinking about the wedding made her remember the round box sitting half hidden behind a sofa in the sitting room.
“I’ve got something for you,” she told him. “Hold on.”
She rose from the table and went to fetch it. The box filled her arms, and she could feel her heart drumming in her chest as nerves overcame her.
“I was going to save it for a wedding and Christmas gift, but I think you should open it now.”
He was sitting in the chair where she’d left him, turned away from the table, and he stared at her, perplexed. “A gift? For me?”
* * *
Jack didn’t know what to say as Merritt pressed what looked to be a hat box into his hands.
He turned it around, uncertain.
“Open it,” she prompted.
He could barely look at her in that dress. He’d walked inside, still raw and reeling from the kiss they’d shared that morning. Still fighting with himself, Mr. Carson’s story from earlier today echoing in the back of his mind. The story of a boy who’d taken his inheritance and walked out on his family. Who’d lost everything and come crawling back.
