Page 99 of Charlotte
“Wounded men wound others without meaning to.”
“They can.”
“And I am romanticizing his pain.”
“Are you?”
Lottie’s breath caught. There it was. The worry beneath every careful question.
She gripped the folded drawing in both hands. “You think I have made him into a story.”
“We know you love stories.”
“I do. That does not mean I cannot love a man.”
Delly looked away first. Lottie saw it and pressed on, because if she stopped now she might lose courage.
“You think I am too young to know the difference between pity and love. So does he. You both keep handing me the same accusation wrapped in different paper.”
“I have never accused you of pitying him.”
“You have thought it.”
Delly’s gaze returned to her. “I have feared it.”
“That is worse.”
“No,” Delly said, and for once her voice rose. “It is not worse. It is honest. I have feared many things where you are concerned, and I will not apologize for loving you enough to be frightened.”
“I am not asking you to stop loving me. I am asking you to stop standing between me and every hard thing in the world.”
Delly’s mouth trembled once, barely, before she controlled it. Lottie saw it. The sight softened her and sharpened her at the same time.
“You have done it for five years,” Lottie said. “Since Mama and Papa died. Since there was only us, and you decided being fourteen meant becoming forty overnight. You kept bread on the table. You kept a roof over us. You kept me safe when no one else was there to care whether I was safe.”
Delly looked down at her hands.
“I love you for it,” Lottie said. “More than I know how to say without crying, which is terribly inconvenient right now because I am still angry with you.”
A faint, unwilling sound escaped Delly.
Lottie’s own eyes burned.
“You cannot keep me from being hurt,” she continued. “Nobody can do that. Mama and Papa loved us better than anyone, and they still left us with grief we did not know how to carry. Love does not make a wall high enough to stop pain from entering. It only gives a person somewhere to go when it does.”
Delly said nothing.
Lottie stepped closer to the wall but still did not sit.
“You cannot stand in my doorway forever with your back to me,” she said. “You cannot keep testing every road before I put my foot on it. You cannot tell me to be sensible about Peterson when you married Jebediah Simms on Sunday after knowing him for only a day.”
Delly’s head lifted.
Lottie saw the name land.
Cecil.
Her sister did not correct it. That helped.
