Page 93 of Promised to the Cowboy

Evie’s head turns toward me. I feel her question before she asks it.

“Mail-order brides?” she whispers.

“Long story.”

“How long?”

“Would probably fill six romance novels.”

Her brow furrows.

I kiss her temple before she can demand an explanation.

Maggie clears her throat pointedly and continues. “And yes. The clown-school clause stands. I’m not removing it. I put it in on purpose, and I laughed about it every day afterward. If you want to know why, you’ll have to ask me, and you can’t, so it will just have to drive you crazy forever. You’re welcome.”

“Now,” Maggie reads, and the faint humor leaves her voice, “the hard part. The part I really wrote this for. Jacob. Ben.”

Across the table, my father goes perfectly still. Ben’s hand tightens around his fork.

“I’ve watched the two of you love each other badly for forty years. Two of the stubbornest, proudest, most wounded men God ever made, and brothers besides, which is the worst combination there is.”

Maggie pauses to look at Ben, then Jacob, before continuing. “Jacob, you kept flying off to other people’s wars because you couldn’t bear to come home to your own. Ben, you let him go and called it pride when it was grief. You’ve both been wrong the whole time. You’ve both known it, and you have both been too proud to be the one who says so first. So I’ll say it for you, from the grave, where I outrank both of you.”

Henry makes a rough sound that might be a laugh.

Neither Jacob nor Ben looks away from Maggie.

“Ben, if Jacob is too proud to come home, you send him this letter and tell him I said so. Tell him his sister-in-law said it with her own dead hand, and that she outranks a Navy man and a rancher both and always did. You come home, Jacob Sutton. You come home and sit at your brother’s table. You let him forgive you, and you forgive him back, because I am not spending eternity watching the two of you waste whatever time you have left being right at each other.”

Maggie’s voice breaks on the final words.

Jacob stares down at his hands. Those hands have flown aircraft, held weapons, buried the woman he loved, and spent thirtyyears finding work anywhere except the place he was needed most.

Ben looks at him from across the corner of the table. Neither man speaks.

Maggie takes a slow breath. “And the last thing. For all of you. Gabriel, this part is mostly for you, and I think you know why. You are always enough.”

The sentence goes through me like a blade.

Evie’s grip tightens around my hand.

“Every single one of you. Do you hear me? Whatever you’ve told yourself in the dark about being too much, or not enough, or the wrong shape, or the cause of the worst thing that ever happened—it is a lie. It was always a lie. You are enough. Every one of you is enough, exactly as you are. And I have seen you. All of you. The whole time. Even the parts you hid. Especially the parts you hid. I see you.”

My breath catches. For one impossible second, the room disappears and I’m a boy again, standing in a doorway while my father looks at the green eye I inherited from my mother and sees only the woman who died giving it to me. The cause of the worst thing that ever happened.

Evie moves my hand to her stomach and presses it against our child. Our daughter.

I breathe again.

“Now go on,” Maggie reads, “be good to each other. Protect the land. Love the strange ones who marry into this mess. And let the children be loud. I’ll keep a place set. All my love, forever, Ruth.”

Maggie lowers the pages.

Nobody at the table moves. The silence isn’t empty. It’s crowded with every person who should be sitting here and isn’t. Caroline. Ruth. The people Ben and Jacob were before grief split them down the middle. Every version of this family that nearly failed to make it to this table.

Maggie folds the letter along its old creases, then she reaches into the pocket of her apron and removes a small velvet pouch. The material is faded and worn soft. Whatever sits inside lands against the table with a muted, heavy sound.

Maggie rests two fingers on it. Her gaze travels down the table and pauses on Evie for a second before moving away.