“Oh, God, forgive me.” She leaned forward, eased off her stool until the summer-warm floor welcomed her knees. How long since He had been her desire? How long since she sought Him, sought Him and expected to meet Him? “Let me climb up near to Thee.”
Rosie settled beside her and rested one comforting hand on her back. “ ‘…always humble and resigned to Thy will, more fixed on Thyself, that I may be more fitted for doing and suffering.’ ”
Fitted for suffering. Suffer she did, but not for Him. Not for His glory, but for her own misery, and that, it seemed, was a crucial difference. Because the grief that consumed her, while understandable, had kept her fixated on herself, not on Him. She had not been like Papa, who turned ever more to the Lord in the face of mourning. She had been like…a child.
My child. Come unto Me, my laboring and heavy-laden child. I shall give you rest.
“Rest.” The word came out on a moan. A yearning, a plea. She stretched a hand along the rug as if she could grasp that promise and pull it close.
The hissing, waking nightmare of a voice came again. His rest is death. If that is what you seek, then go find it. Join your father, your mother.
“No.” No, no, no. Exhausted as she was, she knew that was no answer. Had she wanted death, she would have screamed when her father fell. She would have let Uncle Gates strike her down then and there. She would have slid into the jowls of the monster on the ship and plunged into the netherworld. But death was not what she sought—simply peace. Rest.
And she had thought she had it. Had thought it in her hand and, more, happiness with it. That all she had to do was make a place for herself here, beside Thad. That if she could but stay in his arms…but he had left. And what if, as Rosie asked, he never came back? How would she survive then? How, for that matter, could she join her life to a ship’s captain’s and suffer this anew every time he left?
Rosie wove her fingers through Gwyneth’s still-outstretched ones. “Where is your rest, Gwyneth child? Was it in your daddy?”
Her muscles went taut across her shoulders, up her neck, down her back. Papa, precious Papa—his death certainly marked the end of her peace. But if it had been in him, then would she not have felt so anxious, so exhausted every time he was away? On each and every campaign? But she hadn’t. She worried, certainly, but it had never consumed her. Not like this.
She shook her head, the rug rubbing her forehead.
Rosie smoothed a hand over Gwyneth’s hair, so neatly caught back now. “No, your rest can’t lie with him. Maybe it seemed so at first, since his loss started you on this journey. But he never stopped being gone, yet you stopped being so restless for a while there. Right?”
She tried to swallow, though her throat felt too dry. “I…” An attempt at a steadying breath sent a tremor through her. “I cannot explain it. I had begun to feel safe—”
“Only when Thaddeus was here. Ain’t that right?”
Of course not. That couldn’t be, and she opened her mouth to say so. But her tongue tangled around the words, and the realization pounded her like the rain did the pane of her window.
Every time, every single time she had slept before he went on this trip had been when he was home. As if attuned to his footsteps, she had awakened the minute he left the house—and often fallen asleep within minutes of his return. Beginning, for some bizarre reason, the very day she arrived.
“That makes no sense.” She squeezed Rosie’s fingers and wished she could grasp the workings of her mind so easily. “Perhaps now it would, given how much I…”
Rosie chuckled. “Go ahead and say it. How much you love him. We all know you do.”
Perhaps she did, and perhaps they all knew it. But such words ought not be spoken so casually. “But at the start, I scarcely knew him. I knew only that…”
She jerked upright and met Rosie’s gaze. “I knew only that my father trusted him, and so I trusted him.”
Rosie patted her hand. “Makes sense when you think of it like that. Rest can’t come unless you put your trust in someone. Problem is, you put yours in a man. And as wonderful a man as he is, he can’t always be here, child. He gonna go away now and then. He gonna mess up now and then when he’s home. He gonna fail you.”
He will fail you always. He will never come home. Why should he come home to you?
She shook her head to clear it of those doubts and called up the image of Thad. Thad, with his selfless heart and intuitive spirit. Thad, who must have altered his entire life to accommodate her needs these last two months. His smile, always so quick to try to tease out hers. His hands, so quick to catch her when she fell. His eyes, speaking those words she wouldn’t yet put to voice.
Was trust enough to have made the connection she felt to him? Was it merely that her father had entrusted her to him? It couldn’t be. That alone couldn’t account for how her feet always found him, for the way he had filled her heart.