“No one expected you to. You weren’t raised to ask those kinds of questions.” Why, then, did his tone sound so incredulous? Probably for the same reason he spat out her grandfather’s favorite exclamation of “Thunder and turf!” and did a quick pivot away and then back. “How couldn’t you know, Yetta? How could you not know what they were like? How could you even marry a family that owned slaves, knowing well how so many of them are treated?”
Her hands shook. Maybe it was the cold. Or maybe she couldn’t stop trying to lie to herself even now. Fingers fisting in her gray skirt, she looked up into the accusation. He had aged in the last six years, of course. But as he towered over her now, he looked like he had then, as he flung the world’s problems at her like they were her fault.
And in this particular case, maybe he was right. She swallowed back the bile that rose up on the heels of truth. “I didn’t care. You’d left me, and I just didn’t care.”
She expected an explosion. A curse. Maybe even for him to storm off. Instead, his shoulders sagged and he leaned into the door beside her, propping his elbows on the top of it. “It was the only thing I could do. You know that. Surely by now you can understand.”
She had understood then. But that hadn’t made it hurt any less. “You crushed me. I loved you, and you walked away.”
“There was no other choice. What kind of life would we have had? Me, a quadroon who would never rise above a trade worker, and you the rich daughter of an important white family?”
It hadn’t stopped him from giving her her first kiss in her daddy’s stable when she was sixteen. Hadn’t stopped his lips against all those promises of love and dreams, each one etched in her mind forever. All of them dust. “I would have gone with you.”
“You would have been miserable.”
“You can’t know that!” She averted her face, knowing her voice had been too loud. “You never gave me the chance to prove my mettle. You ran.”
“Yeah. I ran.” And he obviously wasn’t about to apologize for it. She stared at the stall across from her, at the swishing tail of the horse that watched her warily. Walker toed the wood on which she leaned. “I wasn’t going to. Stephen said I had to.”
Stephen? No. “He didn’t even…” She halted when she felt the weight of his gaze. “You told him.”
“I couldn’t run off with my best friend’s sister and not even tell him I loved her.”
Yet he could run away from the woman he claimed to love without a word. If she hadn’t seen the light and gone to investigate, she never would have known he was leaving.
She had. They fought. He ran.
She had spun into the social world with a gusto born of wrath.
And she had proven her mettle. Proven it to be not of gold but of the cheapest alloy. Pushing herself up, she leaned beside him, still facing the opposite stall. “You saved her. Cora, I mean. By marrying her.”
“Easiest decision I ever made. She’s a good woman, Yetta. She’s made my life complete, her and Elsie. I love them both more than I thought I could love anyone.” He nudged her with his elbow, and when she glanced up, she saw his handsome, happy smile. “You’ll find that yet.”
Marietta shook her head and looked away again. “I squandered my chance, Walk. I’ve made decisions I can’t undo.”
“Don’t talk like that.” He pushed away from the stall door and stepped in front of her, his brows knit. “You’re young yet. And as bleak as things look right now, they’ll change. They always do. The war will end, the Knights will fall, the dust will settle. You’ll be able to get away from these people and start over.”
“It’s not that easy.” Saying it pierced through all those optimistic dreams about going home and breaking things off with Dev. Yet it brought relief too. Because for the first time, she was being honest with herself about how completely she had messed up. “Dev isn’t going to let me go.”
“He can’t stop you.”
“Can’t he?” Tears gathered, but she must hold them off. Just a few more minutes. “We’d been planning to marry as soon as it was acceptable.”
“Yetta.” He shifted and reached for her hand. As it had when he’d taken it that morning two weeks ago, it gave comfort, even if it shouldn’t. “I know this is a bad thing to say given the conversation just past, but promises can be broken. Sometimes they have to be.”
And comfort could evaporate like a drop of water on a summer-hot cobblestone in the face of one’s own shame. She tugged her fingers free and looked down to the hay-strewn floor. “I gave him more than a promise.”
Even the horses went silent. She didn’t want to glance up again, didn’t want to see the revulsion on his face. But the quiet was too heavy.
Though they looked nothing alike, he reminded her of Stephen in that moment. The way his expression combined sorrow with pain for her. “Tell me you don’t mean what I think you do.”