Hearts Awakening (28 page)

“Yes.”

“But I saw you toss it into the fire,” she argued, her gaze glistening with tears.

“I did, but—”

“But why? Why would you do something so cruel?”

As he laid the leather thong with the ring onto his lap, he lowered his gaze and swallowed hard. “I’ve sat here for hours asking myself the same question.”

“Did you ever come up with an answer?”

He let out a long, deep breath. Admitting his faults to himself had been hard. Admitting his faults to her now was even harder, but he raised his gaze to meet hers. “I knew how much the ring meant to you. I think I even knew that you wouldn’t have hidden it away from me and that you must have found it over the course of the day. But I was so angry when I read the note Grizel left, I deliberately kept it, instead of packing it into your travel bag with that silhouette I found.”

She blinked back her tears. “If you were so angry with me, why would you want to keep my wedding ring?”

“In all truth, I’m still not certain,” he replied, holding her gaze. “Then later, when you were so stubborn and insisted on staying here, even though I told you over and over that you had to leave, I think I realized the only way to get you to go was to hurt you so badly you wouldn’t want to stay. That’s when I tossed the ring into the fire. I’m sorry. It was cruel of me.”

She moistened her lips but did not look away. “Yes, it was very cruel and very hurtful.”

“Fortunately, for both of us, the ring took a good bounce and ended up lying in the corner of the hearth. I managed to get it out of the fireplace before the flames reached it.”

Ellie made a fist with her hand, as if protecting the gold ring she now wore. “I don’t understand why you’d try to destroy that ring one moment, rescue it the next, and then loop it onto a thong of leather to wear around your neck.”

“Because of you.”

Her gaze was wary.

“No matter what I said or did, I couldn’t make you leave. I couldn’t even make you angry enough to lose your temper. But it wasn’t until you told me you were going back to the Grants’ to check on Gram and to fetch the boys home that I finally realized my grave error. Once I realized the ring hadn’t been destroyed, I thought I should keep it as a reminder of a promise I made to myself—a promise I want to make to you now—that I won’t ever let my anger blind me again and jump to conclusions before I give you a chance to explain. And . . . and I’ll be more supportive with Daniel and Ethan, too.”

When she nodded, he could see the hurt he had done to her was still shimmering in her eyes, but he did detect just a glimmer of relief, too. His relief was just as real, and he quickly slipped the leather thong over his head and tucked it beneath his shirt again.

“Would you like to know where I found the ring?” she asked.

“I assume it was somewhere in the kitchen, but that’s not important now. What’s important is that—”

“I found it in Daniel’s pillowcase, along with a silhouette of my mother that had disappeared from my room. Actually, they were both in the pillowcase with Rebecca’s pillow, the one he brought home with him several weeks ago from your Sunday house.”

Shocked, he listened carefully as she explained how she had discovered the missing treasures, as well as the boys’ secret tent they had been using during the night.

“The only way Daniel could have known about the silhouette is through Ethan, which proves he does talk to Daniel. There’s no other explanation,” she concluded.

He could draw no other conclusion, either, and told her so. “What do I do with Daniel now?”

Her gaze softened. “I don’t know. I put the pillowcase back on the pillow again. Once he realizes the treasures he’s collected are gone, which he may have already done, he’s bound to worry about where they’ve gone. I suspect Ethan will tell him I was in the room earlier today cleaning, so Daniel will just assume that I found them and reclaimed them.”

“Which means he’ll expect that you’ll tell me and then he’ll worry about what I’m going to do to punish him.”

“I think that’s likely, too.”

He swallowed the lump in his throat. “If I punish him, which he deserves, he’ll only turn against you more than he already has. But he has to learn that what he did was wrong.”

She shifted in her seat. “I think I’d like to talk to him first. Perhaps I can convince him to come to you and confess what he’s done,” she suggested. “Then we can sit down together, all four of us, since Ethan is involved, too, and decide what to do.”

“When?”

“I don’t want to wait too long. Later today. Perhaps he could stay home with me this afternoon. Once Ethan takes his nap, Daniel and I would have some time alone to talk.”

“Then you’re really not leaving,” he said, shaking his head.

She sighed, but it was several very long, tense moments before she answered him. “No. I’m not leaving.”

“I suppose I still find that hard to believe.”

She sat up straighter and squared her shoulders. “Please don’t mistake my view of you and the boys as gifts or my commitment to our marriage as some sort of invitation to continue exploding at me whenever you get upset with something I do. I want to stay and I want to make our marriage work for the boys’ sake, but there’s little hope I’ll be able to do that. Not unless and until you do something about the anger you’ve been carrying around for so long that you don’t even know it’s there until it erupts and nearly consumes you and everyone around you.”

Jackson stared at her. No other woman, or man, for that matter, had ever had the audacity to talk to him like this. No other woman had ever challenged him the way she had over the past month. No other woman had ever been as confident of herself or her faith, either.

He had not anticipated her boldness or her honesty. He had not invited her tenacity, for that matter. But since she apparently had no immediate plans to leave, he needed to prove to her that he could be just as bold or honest or tenacious as she was.

Starting right here and right now.

Twenty-Seven

Ellie caught her breath and held it, but when Jackson stiffened his back, she knew she had spoken to him too brashly.

Unfortunately, she was too exhausted to care much about his feelings, unless he was so offended he would try to put her out of the house again. In that case, she was not so sure she would not end up sleeping on the porch, when all she wanted was the comfort of her own bed.

“You make it sound as if I haven’t tried to control my anger. It’s not that easy,” he argued.

His gaze was so cold Ellie shivered and shifted her gaze from him to the fire. “It’s never easy.”

“As if you’d know,” he quipped. “Did you grow up as an orphan? Do you know what it’s like watching other kids grow up with their parents, knowing you’ll never have that again? Do you know how hard it is to fall asleep at night when you’re barely ten years old, knowing no one cares, really cares about you? Or that you’re all alone in this world?”

His words were so harshly spoken, she nearly cringed. “No, of course I don’t, but—”

“Then please don’t tell me it’s never easy. You’d never know how hard it was for me, because you grew up with parents who loved you.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t have hurts I have to forgive or resentments that dig deep into my soul,” she replied.

“That’s not the same thing at all.”

“Why? Because you assume that growing up with my parents was idyllic? Or that I may have suffered my hurts or harbored my resentments more as an adult than as a child? They’re still as real to me as yours are. The only difference between you and me is that I’m trying to let go of my disappointments and my anger, while you continue to hold on to yours,” she charged, unable to stop the flow of her thoughts as they became words.

To her relief, he did not reply right away, but when he did speak, his voice was low and even. “What resentments?”

She sighed and looked at him again, grateful to see his gaze had actually softened a bit, too. “You’re a man. You couldn’t possibly . . . understand.”

He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Fine. Then I’ll tell you,” she said, although the thought of sharing details of her life with him when she had not shared them with anyone else before made her uncomfortable. “When you were eighteen and found a home here with James Glad-son, I was turning twenty-one, still living at home with my parents. My mother had been an invalid for almost as long as I can remember, so I was expected to stay and keep house for my parents, which I did willingly. After my father died, I cared for my mother until she finally died, too. That was three years ago.”

“That much I knew, although I didn’t realize your mother had been sickly.”

“What I haven’t shared with you was that by the time I was free to marry, I was twenty-eight. I was too old to be considered a good marriage prospect, which is not something men have to worry about, is it? Men can marry or remarry at any age and still have children. Women can’t.” She twisted the ring on her finger as her cheeks warmed.

“I loved my parents, and I treasure my memories of them,” she added before he misconstrued what she was trying to say. “I’ll never regret the years I spent caring for them. I was obviously much older when I became an orphan than you were, but all I was left with after they had both died was a travel bag that held what little I owned, memories of the two ridiculous proposals I’d turned down over the years in order to care for them, and a deep resentment, even anger, that I had to depend on the charity of my cousins just to survive.”

He furrowed his brow. “You were angry with your parents?”

“For a time, yes—but I was also angry with God,” she admitted and bowed her head for a moment. “I couldn’t understand why He’d given this lonely, difficult life to me. Other women my age had already married. They had husbands and homes and children of their own, while I ended up with nothing. All I had to look forward to was spending the rest of my life living with Cousin Philip, which turned out to be much harder than I thought it would be, as I’ve already told you. Being sent off to live with Cousin Mark didn’t improve things, which only made me angrier,” she added.

“Then why are you lecturing me about my being angry when you just admitted that you get angry, too?” Jackson asked.

“Because I know in my heart that uncontrolled anger is wrong. It’s destructive and . . . and it’s pointless . . . so I’ve tried to forgive others who hurt me, because it’s what God expects me to do. It’s what we should all do. I’m still struggling to do that, because if I don’t, I know I’ll never be able to embrace the gifts God has chosen for me, instead of longing for the gifts He’s given to others.”

He snorted. “Through forgiveness.”

“In part, yes,” she said, troubled that he did not understand what she was trying to say. After taking a deep breath, as well as a leap of faith, she swallowed hard. “Do you know what Cousin Mark’s wife, Olivia, said when I told her we had gotten married?”

He shrugged. “I would hope she offered her sincere congratulations.”

“She wanted me to know that the only reason you married me was because I was so uncommonly plain, you’d never have to worry that I’d betray you like Rebecca had done simply because no other man could possibly want me. But that was only after Cousin Mark wanted to know how I could possibly decide to get married without asking him first, especially since I had chosen to marry a man whose name was still tainted by scandal.”

“How charitable of them,” Jackson quipped.

“I agree, but we’re all less than charitable at one time or another. I’m not saying I’m not deeply, deeply hurt and disappointed with them or with you for wanting to toss me out of your life today without giving me a chance to explain why I’d left the island, but I wasn’t angry. Just hurt. I still am.” To be honest, what hurt even more was that Jackson did not even try to soften her cousin’s assessment of why he had married her.

Jackson shook his head. “I still don’t understand why you’re not angry with me. It’s not the first time I’ve misjudged you.”

She stifled a yawn. “I’m not certain I do, either, but I think it’s because I’m no longer afraid you’ll set me aside, because in all truth, there isn’t a thing I can do to stop you if that’s what you really want to do.”

Before he could offer a word in his own defense, she held up her hand before she lost the courage to finish what she had to say. “My mother gave me some good advice many years ago, but even though I truly believe her advice was good, it’s still a struggle for me to follow it,” she admitted.

“What advice would that be?”

“She said that fear was the root of all anger, but forgiveness was the balm that could put most fears to rest. And it’s through faith that we find forgiveness for ourselves and the courage to forgive others.”

He shifted in his seat. “What are you trying to say now? That I’m only angry because I’m afraid? And that I need to forgive all those people who mistreated me as a child?”

She moistened her lips. “I think we have no other choice but to forgive anyone who’s hurt us. Eventually.”

Her words hung in the air as he turned away and stared into the fire. Jackson had been angry for so long she was not certain he could recognize his fears and let that anger go, especially if that involved forgiving all the people who had ever hurt him. Including, she suspected, his late wife.