By the time she got back Mrs. Lee had put out a plate of sandwiches and a pot of tea and disappeared back into the kitchen. Anna sat just beside her aunt and gently picked up one of her hands. They were very delicate, as if the bones had gone as hollow as a bird’s. The skin was soft and shiny and speckled with age spots.
“You’ve been using the wax bath for your joints,” Anna said. “I hope it helps with the pain.”
“It does,” her aunt said. “The heat is wonderful. And the teas, they help too.”
But not enough, Anna knew. This woman who had spent all her life doing things with her hands would sit just as she was, for whatever time was left to her.
“I can remember you painting,” Anna said. “You handled the paintbrush like I handle a scalpel. I was little, but I remember.”
“You were seven when I stopped.”
Anna nodded. “When you were working I had the idea that you were painting a window I could walk through if I tried.”
Her aunt smiled. “Very fanciful, for such a serious young mind. You were so quiet, sitting in the corner. I often forgot you were there. Of course that was before Sophie.”
Anna remembered what it had felt like to be alone. “I love Sophie and Cap,” Anna said. “And wouldn’t change a thing, but sometimes it’s nice to have you to myself.”
“So,” Aunt Quinlan said. “Here we are, by ourselves. You married Jack Mezzanotte.”
Anna laughed. “Yes, I did. Although sometimes it all feels unreal. Was it like that when you got married?”
Her aunt’s expression was thoughtful. After a moment she said, “You know that your aunt Hannah’s people believe that the dead are never far away. She told me once—and this was before she met Ben—that her first husband and little boy sometimes came from the Shadowlands to talk to her. Some people dislike that idea because it frightens them. But when Simon died, I waited and waited. I wanted him to come back to talk to me, in my dreams at least. I wanted to scold him for being so reckless on the ice floes, the day he died. And he did come, finally, but by that time I wasn’t angry at him anymore. I just missed him.
“He still comes now and then, and when he does he looks as he did when we were young. Sometimes he has our littlest three girls with him, the ones we lost too soon.”
“And Nathaniel?”
Aunt Quinlan talked sometimes about her son, the last of six and the only boy. Nathaniel Ballentyne had died at Shiloh, on his twenty-fifth birthday, unmarried, childless.
“Nathaniel most of all,” her aunt said. “He knew how angry I was about him going off to fight. He’s been trying to make it up to me ever since. Sometimes he is as real to me as you are, sitting there.”
She shook herself a little. “Enough of that. There was something I wanted to tell you, and you let me wander off.”
Anna tried to prepare her mind, but Aunt Quinlan’s stories were never predictable.
“As a little girl you already knew what it meant to lose the people you love, and that made you shy. Then the war came along and we lost Paul and Harrison, and made it ten times worse. When you and Cap got to be friends I thought, Maybe he’ll pull her out of it, and he did. A good ways, he brought you back to being brave enough to face the world. Sophie brought you along even further. But it’s there in you still, the need to hide away.”
Anna had heard this before and she knew that it was at least in part true.
“So you’re saying Jack is going to change my view of things?”
Aunt Quinlan looked at her with an expression that was pure surprise. “That would be a silly thing to say, Anna. You know as well as I do that people rarely change once they reach a certain age. What I’m saying is, you’re a turned-inward soul; it’s the way you cope with the hard things in life. You hide away.”
“You think Jack doesn’t realize that about me.”
“Maybe he does,” her aunt said. “But if he does it’s only in his mind; he doesn’t know what it will feel like. I’m taking a long time to get to my point, so here it is. Hard things come along; they always have and they always will. When that time comes, you have to turn toward Jack and not away from him. And that’s not in your nature. You love the man—don’t bother blushing, I know you love him even if you can’t say the word in your own mind—but your first instinct will be still to shut him out. So be aware of that, and do what you can to stop yourself.”