Page 5 of A Forgotten Heart
He didn’t move, his face a mask. “I live here.”
He lived here? She knew hisfamilylived here. She’d arrived in town full of nerves, breathless at the thought of seeing him again. But it’d been months, and she’d never seen him. “You’re not teaching?” It was a silly question. She was the teacher in the one-room schoolhouse. But if he lived nearby, that meant he wasn’t a teacher after all.
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “You sent the children home early? You’re the teacher?”
How could the simple words, spat out like that, sound like an insult?
Elsie’s stomach churned. She gripped her wet skirt to keep her hands from shaking and raised her chin so he wouldn’t see the way her lips threatened to tremble. “I am.”
“What happened in Elk Creek?”
Her chin notched higher. “I left.” She refused to admit how things had worked out. Not to him. “When Merritt retired, she let me know of the opening. And here I am.” She spread her hands out to punctuate her sentence.
He remained closed off, revealing nothing. She’d never experienced Nick like this. He’d always been open to her. Until those very last moments together…
No, she couldn’t think about that.
So instead, she cleared her throat. “It’s been a busy semester. The Christmas pageant went well.” Except for when one of the school board members had come in and demanded his daughter be the lead.
Merritt’s voice rang out from the kitchen. “I found it! Sorry, Nick?—”
His head jerked to the left, his eyes blinking furiously as if he’d forgotten where he was, what he was doing here. “I have to go.”
“Nick, wait?—”
For a moment, Elsie thought he would shoulder her out of the way.
“Move.”
She stepped aside, shaken. The Nick she’d known before would never have spoken so coldly.
She called after him as he went out into the blowing snow. “I’ve thought about what I might say if we ever met again?—”
“I haven’t thought about you at all.”
She barely heard his mutter over the wind, but the words struck her like a blow from a ruler across the backs of her knuckles. Sharp, shooting pain.
Tears gathered. Different tears than before.
The door snapped closed behind him, and Elsie’s chest heaved beneath the hand splayed across her chest.
Her strength drained away. She leaned against the hallway wall and slid down.
She heard Merritt’s swishing dress stop beside her.
Elsie muttered, “You didn’t tell me Nick lived at home.”
Merritt stood over her with surprise in her wide eyes. Obviously, she’d overheard some of Nick’s parting words. “What happened?”
Elsie couldn’t speak. She’d come face-to-face with the man who’d been a part of the worst moment of her life—and it was like opening a box of stuffed-away pain. Everything came flooding back.
Elsie shook her head.
Merritt sighed. “I thought you and Nick had been friends.”
Friends? Oh, they’d been so much more than that. But back then, Elsie had wanted to keep things about Nick to herself.
“Obviously, there’s more to it.”
