“If you love me like you say you do, you should be able to trust me for—”
“Reese!” Letitia, her forearms clutched together across her middle as if in real agony, cried out. “I don’t know enough to give you that trust! You must tell me what’s going on, or—or—”
He, too, had risen, but less like a menacing cobra and more like a towering maple about to fall. “Or what?”
“Or—or we’ll call everything off, here and now!”
“Don’t,” he suggested evenly, with a muscle bulging ominously in his jaw, “make threats you have no intention of keepin’.”
Tears once again glimmered in her eyes. Helpless tears, this time. Desperate tears. “Go away, Reese,” she told him, her voice sounding like a death knell. “And don’t come back unless and until you’re willing to share with me what’s going on.”
Flinging him one last hopeless look, she grabbed her skirts, turned, and pelted into the house. The sturdy back door slammed shut, and the hard cold snap of the lock rang out through the stillness.
She watched through a meager gap in the parlor’s curtains as his tall form, shoulders sagging, trudged slowly away into the late afternoon sunlight. Something halfway between a shriek and a sob bubbled up from deep inside. And then she collapsed, in a siege of violent weeping that immediately rendered her immobile.
Eventually, after the spate had finally slackened off into an occasional whimper, Letitia realized that she needed to seek the advice of someone who would understand.
Molly was, as always, ensconced at the jail, laughing and chatting like a freed bird with the jail’s master. The two were alone, fortunately, with no prying glances to judge, no speculative eyebrows to raise. Because, by the time Letty had tracked down her sister, she looked like the wreck of the Hesperus and wanted no one else to witness her humiliation. Hair in complete disarray, eyes reddened and swollen, cheeks blotchy, lips a-tremble—Molly, viewing all this when the girl stumbled through the law office door, leaped upright in shock.
“What happened, honey?” she demanded, rushing to wrap comforting arms around the distraught figure. “What in the world happened to you?”
Paul, too, had swept to his feet, impatiently kicking the desk chair out of his way. Protective of any member of Molly’s family for her sake, and for womanhood in general, he joined in the clamor. “Has somebody hurt you, Letty? Do I need to go knock the stuffin’ out of some mucky vagrant?”
“It isn’t—it isn’t a vagrant,” she hiccoughed from the support of Molly’s shoulder. “It’s—R-R-R-Reese!”
“Reese! But I thought things were going just fine with the two of you!” Molly, patting and rubbing at the same time, protested in surprise. “Here, come sit down and tell us all about it. Paul, sweetheart, a cup of coffee, if you please?”
Settled in an extra chair beside the desk, Letty accepted both a full enamel ware cup and her sister’s lace-edged handkerchief. She needed very little prodding to spill out the whole sad story, and her reaction.
Molly, who had been pacing in agitation while she listened, paused to stamp her foot. “The cad! The unsufferable cad!” Had the venom twisting her voice been poured into a shot of whiskey for the aforementioned cad, his first sip would have knocked him over dead. “How can he treat you so shabbily? You were absolutely right, Letty. Throw him out with the dishwater!”
“I don’t understand,” Letitia wept. “He said he wants to plan for a future. And yet he stalls off everything, without an explanation.”
No one could ask for a more staunch, more devoted ally in this painful contretemps than Molly, who had lived through the same sort of ordeal which was now worrying Letitia. Issues of credence, of conviction, of certitude: if these could not be proven right and true, then how was one to proceed?
“There, there, you just cry it out.” Molly was doing her best to be supportive, patting her sister’s arm, brushing back her tumbled curls. “We’ll figure something, honey. We won’t let him off the hook so easily. We’ll run him out of town on a rail, won’t we, Pau
l?”
Silence.
“Won’t we, Paul?”
Still silence, as her betrothed sat staring off into space, contemplating the situation.
“Paul!”
Startled, he turned his attention from whatever he was considering to the problem at hand. “Oh. Sorry, sweetheart, I was wool-gatherin’.”
“Yes, so I saw.” Clearly Molly was none too pleased. “And what conclusion did you come to?”
“You want my advice?”
“Well, of course we do, silly! What do you think we’ve been talking about?”
“I’d do what Reese asked. Be patient, and wait.”
Molly huffed out an exasperated breath. “Oh, you—you man, you!”