Page 105 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Holt was beginning to wish he’d just handed Betsy a handkerchief and confined himself to sympathetic noises. But he’d started this. He had to see it through. “My father was . . . easily frustrated. He liked to take out his frustrations on those who couldn’t fight back. Like my mother. Or me, when I was younger.” He’d meant to leave it at that, but the words tore out of him, words he never intended to say. “He wasn’t like that before I was born. My sisters love him. Everyone loves him. It was just me. It was something about me, about the way I am. I was small, I was sickly, I had headaches. I wasn’t the son he wanted.”

Holt could feel all the old emotions boiling up, as though he were eight again instead of twenty-eight. Fear and confusion—and guilt. All those nights, lying sleepless under the stars, or in a bunkhouse, or in a train car, trying not to think about it, trying not to remember, trying to persuade himself that it was all done, that he was someone else now. All the running, all the pretending, all undone in a moment. So much for Hold ’Em Holt, scourge of bandits. He was a scared boy in a silent house, listening at doors, lurking by his mother’s room, wanting to make it all stop but not sure how. Knowing, somehow, that all this was his fault. For being born. For being himself. He would have given anything to have been anyone other than who he was.

Holt could feel the wall hard against his back. “When I went off to college . . . things were better for a while. I’d finally done something I was meant to do. I was his boy at Harvard. I thought—maybe it was over. But then I did something. I don’t even remember what now. Joined the wrong club, took the wrong girl to the wrong dance—it didn’t seem like it mattered at the time—but it all started up again. My mother claiming to be indisposed, clumsy, hurting herself. . . . I told her to leave him.”

“Of course you did!” Betsy said stoutly. “I’d have done the same. What was wrong with that?”

“Everything,” Holt said bitterly. “I was so smug. I thought all I had to do was tell her to pack her bags and it would all be fixed. I was a second year at the law school and I didn’t want to be bothered. That’s not how I put it to myself, but that was what it was.”

“Don’t you think your mother had some say in the matter?” demanded Betsy. “You might have suggested it, but it was her choice in the end.”

End being the operative word. Acid burned at the back of Holt’s throat.

“She wouldn’t have made the attempt if I hadn’t pushed her into it.” Holt had gone over it in his head time and again, blaming himself, hating himself. “He caught her. He wasn’t going to let her leave him. An accident, he called it. Just another accident. Everyone knew about her accidents. But this time, there weren’t going to be any more. This time she broke her neck. He broke her neck.”

“Holt. I’m so sorry. That was your father, not you. You’re not responsible for what he did.”

“There’s a thing in law called proximate cause,” said Holt slowly, trying to put his scrambled thoughts into words. “It’s not just the immediate action but the chain of action that leads to the harm. You have to ask, could you have foreseen that what you did would cause the end result? When I told my mother to leave, I should have known that would set my father off.”

Betsy tilted her head to try to peer at his face. “You couldn’t know he’d be there when she tried to leave. You couldn’t know he’d push her down the stairs.”

“I didn’t know. But I could have guessed. I should have been there.” That was the worst of it. He should have been there. But there had been cases to study and articles to edit for the Law Review. . . . Holt felt sick with self-loathing. “Did you guess your Charles was going to follow you to—where was it?”

“Lamia. No. I never—I never thought of it. That’s what’s so miserable about it. Maybe if I had thought . . . But I didn’t, not really. That’s how I hurt people, by not thinking. I never mean to do harm, but I do anyway.” Betsy scrubbed her nose furiously with the back of her hand. “My brother, Alex, always said I killed our mother. I got sick—and she died of it. I was two years old. I don’t remember it. Or her. Alex said I didn’t deserve to remember her.”

Holt went from wanting to punch her lover to wanting to punch her brother. “Your brother is an ass.”

“Well, yes. He is. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

“He’s wrong,” said Holt firmly, feeling better now that they were talking about her again instead of him. “It wasn’t your fault you fell ill. You were a child.”

Betsy looked him in the eye. “So were you.”

Holt felt the way he had when that bullet went through his leg. Nothing at first and then the knowledge you’d been hit. The sting of it. The sense of your own blood leaking out onto the ground.

Betsy pressed both hands flat against his chest, looking up at him, making him look at her. “Whatever happened to your father—whatever changed him—that was him, not you. You’re not responsible for his turning mean. He was probably always mean. He just hid it better.”

“You didn’t kill that Charles,” Holt said hoarsely. “He made his choices. They were his choices, not yours. You don’t hurt people. You’re not bad luck. You’re going to nurse that friend of yours and send her home to her kids.”

Betsy shook her head. Her lashes were still wet with tears. The moisture glistened in the light of the ship’s lanterns. “You don’t know that. You don’t know typhoid.”

“I know you.”

He’d watched her over the past few weeks, watched her working cheerfully, tirelessly, making the impossible possible. Shoving down her own hurts to care for others. He couldn’t stand to think of her hating herself, blaming herself.

Holt cupped her face in his hands, looking into those great, haunted eyes. Into that expressive face that always said so much.

“If anyone survives this, it’s going to be because of you. Do you understand? It’s going to be because of you.”

On board the Seneca

July 15, 1898

This time, there was no doubt about the fact that Betsy kissed him.

She could tell herself she’d done it to stop him talking. She could tell herself it was easier to stop his mouth than argue with him. She could tell herself all sorts of things but the truth of it was that she had no idea why she kissed him; like most things in her life, it just happened.

Ava would tell her nothing just happened. Things happened because she made them happen, because she wanted them to happen, because she couldn’t own up to wanting them to happen.