Page 125 of Bittersweet & Strange

“The second time, I made it inside. Your mother found me before your father did. I spent nearly an hour trying to convince her to leave with me.” Mara’s severe expression softens slightly. “I begged her, Rhys. I told her I had a horse waiting beyond the lower road, that I could hide her here until we figured out somewhere safer to go and that I didn’t care what your father threatened to do to me.”

“What happened?”

“She refused.”

I can see my mother doing that. And I think I know why.

“She wouldn’t leave me.”

“No.”

Mara looks down at her hands.

“She said if she disappeared, your father would never allow her to take you with her. She believed he would punish you for what she had done. I told her we would find a way to get you both out, but she wouldn’t gamble your life on the possibility that I was right.”

I say nothing.

“So she made me promise not to come back.”

“And you listened?”

“Not at first.”

Her eyes lift to mine.

“I sent letters. She sent every one back unopened. I tried sending messages through people who still worked at the castle until your father began dismissing anyone he suspected of helping her communicate with the village.” She pauses. “The last message Belle ever sent me said that every attempt I made to reach her gave him another reason to tighten his grip around both of you.”

I say nothing.

“She told me that if I loved her, I would stay away. And she asked me to keep the village that had failed you both, as far away from her boy as possible.”

The anger I was prepared to throw at her has nowhere to go. Mara looks toward Boone, who is watching us now despite the devastation still written across his face.

“I hated her for asking it of me,” she says quietly. “Then I hated myself for doing what she asked.”

My throat tightens.

“After my father died?”

“I thought about going back.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.” Her gaze returns to me. “By then, Belle had spent years making it very clear that she wanted the village kept away from you both. I had no way of knowing whether his death changed that. Then word reached us that she was dead.”

“Twelve years ago.”

“Yes.”

“You still didn’t come.”

Mara’s expression hardens again, though this time I suspect the anger is directed at herself.

“Maybe I should have.”

The simple admission leaves me with nothing to attack.

“I told myself you were twenty, that you knew where the village was, that if you wanted anything from us, you would come down from that mountain and ask for it.” She shakes her head once. “The truth is uglier. I was ashamed, and after enough years had passed, shame became easier to live with than climbing that mountain and looking my sister’s son in the face.”