She Married Him to Give Him Shelter, Not Knowing He Owned the Whole Territory
Chapter 3
“I know what it means, Betty.” June’s voice came out flat and tired.
“Well.” Mrs. Ralston studied her, the scandal in her face softening into something closer to worry. “What are you going to do?”
June didn’t have an answer. She busied her hands with the kettle instead, needing something to do besides think. And it was there, standing over the stove pouring water she didn’t want into a cup she wouldn’t drink, that the anger finally gave way to something quieter and far more painful underneath.
It wasn’t that he was rich. She had never once in her life dreamed of money. She wouldn’t have known what to do with a fortune if it had fallen out of the sky onto her doorstep. What hurt was this: for two months she had told him real things. True things. About her father’s last winter — how he’d gone quiet at the end, how he’d spent his final weeks fretting over a debt he could no longer repay. About the debt itself, the one that had a stranglehold on this land, the one she was still paying down a little at a time. About the nights she’d lain awake, frightened of dying here alone, unmarried and unremembered. And he had let her believe he understood her as a fellow traveler on the same hard road — a man who had known want, who had known fear, who had nothing to his name but his two hands and his word. When all along he had everything, and had chosen, every single day, to say nothing.
Mrs. Ralston left without another word, sensing correctly that there was nothing more to say.
And June set down the cup she would never drink. She wiped her hands on her apron, twice, though they were already dry, and looked out the window at the barn where her husband had gone back to sleeping on the same pile of hay he’d slept on the very first night she’d found him.
She stood at the window a long while, watching the barn door.
She had told him, once, that she was looking for someone who wouldn’t leave when the work got hard. She had meant it as a promise, a vow, the truest thing she knew how to say. Now the work had gotten hard — the hardest it had ever been — and she was the one standing on the other side of the yard, trying to remember whether what she was about to do was courage or foolishness.
She walked out the door.
The barn smelled of hay and leather and the cold of the morning. He looked up when she entered, and there was something in his face — not the fortune, not the name, not any of it — just tiredness and worry, and it reminded her so achingly of the man she’d married that she almost forgot to be angry.
“Tell me the truth now,” she said. “All of it. Not what you think I want to hear. The truth.”
And for the first time in two months, he didn’t hesitate.