I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go.
“Don’t you see, Kate? We were meant to be together. From the moment I saw you, I knew. It’s always been you.” He let go of my hands so he could gently cup my face. “I love you, Kate. And I want us to be together. Come with me to Charleston. You can set up your own medical practice, be the best doctor you can be. And be my wife, the mother of my children. Please, Kate. Let’s make all that came before us make sense. Say yes.”
How easy it would be to say yes, to give in to everything I’d spent a lifetime fighting. I was an independent woman, my independence hard-won. I knew too much of my grandmother and mother now to believe that love lasted forever, that it would sustain you through an entire lifetime. Wasn’t the fact that Cooper and I were here testament to that simple fact?
I pulled away and stood. “And what about Caroline? You are engaged to be married, or have you forgotten? Surely you must have loved her enough at some point to want to marry her. Is she not enough for you now? And how would you know if I’m enough for you? That you won’t always be looking beyond me for someone else?”
He stood, too, but stayed where he was. “Kate, I love you. I think I’ve loved you my whole life. Please. Don’t do this. Don’t turn your back on something that’s taken three generations to make right.”
I shook my head, seeing my mother’s face as we stood on the sidewalk in front of this same building all those years ago, her expression one of disappointment and regret. Where had I heard that before? “No,” I said. “I am not Olive or Lucy. I am my own woman who doesn’t need a man in her life to survive. I don’t want to end up like them. If anything, their mistakes have been the best education for me.”
He took a step toward me. “Love isn’t a mistake. But I know true love is rare enough that when you find it you fight for it. Marry me, Kate. Come back to Charleston with me and be with me for the rest of our lives.”
I began backing up toward the door. “I can’t.” I shook my head, my eyes blinded with unshed tears.
He didn’t follow me, but his words were strong enough to hold me back. “Tell me you don’t love me and I will let you go. Just tell me that you don’t love me.”
I saw him through the haze of tears, imagined I could see his eyes, which were the color of winter grass. And I remembered my mother and her constant sadness. Disappointment and regret. I opened my mouth and let the words fall out before I could call them back. “I don’t love you.”
He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. Maybe that was what being struck by a bullet was like, how you didn’t know you’d been hit until you began to bleed.
“Good-bye, Cooper.”
I didn’t run away this time, but walked steadily and purposefully out the door. He didn’t follow me, nor did I expect him to. I’d told him what he wanted to hear, what I needed to say so that I could walk away. If only my heart hadn’t betrayed me by remaining back in the forgotten room, in that one place where our story had really begun more than fifty years before.
Twenty-nine
NEW YEAR’S DAY 1894
Olive
For the second time in her life, Olive was awake when the clock chimed midnight on the thirty-first of December, and the old year slid irretrievably into the new.
She hadn’t meant to be awake. She had hoped that 1894 would steal in through the window while she slept, silent and unnoticed, but this was the first lesson you learned as a new mother: Small babies have little, if any, regard for the wishes or convenience of their parents.
So Olive cradled Lucy’s downy head to her breast and listened to the soft chime of the clock on the mantel, and as each note dinged gently into the air, her eyes began to sting and her fingers to shake. (That was another lesson: In the small hours of the morning, while a baby suckled at your breast, you felt as if you were the only two beings alive in the universe, and this loneliness magnified each emotion—whether joy or sorrow or wonder—into something a hundred times greater than your ordinary feelings.) Before Olive’s eyes, the movement of Lucy’s urgent little mouth started to blur, and a drop fell on that round cheek, just as the twelfth chime struck, and the room went quiet.