yourself?”
“Yes. It’s just me, so I wanted the space to be efficient.”
“Are you lying to me or yourself?”
“I think you can find the door.”
Rigsby sighed. “I didn’t come here to argue with you, truly. It’s just . . . you didn’t do this intentionally?”
Aaron looked around the room. It was quaint, but he couldn’t see anything wrong with it. “What are you talking about?”
“It looks exactly like your childhood home. More structurally sound and with a far nicer bed, I’m sure, but the layout is the same.”
“No, it—” Aaron stopped and looked around. How had he not noticed? How could he have deliberately rebuilt his mother’s rundown cottage and not seen it for what it was? “You were there once. How . . . ?”
“I remember everything about that day.”
“You were six.”
“Do you think it matters how old a boy is when his father shows him another little boy and says this is what happens when you don’t act responsibly? That we have to fulfill our duties, no matter how unpleasant they may be? I couldn’t see the difference between you and me, but I saw how you lived and I knew what I was going home to.”
“I’m guessing it had more than one room?” Aaron moved toward his small cookstove and threw a log in the glowing embers to build the fire back up. Not that he wanted Rigsby staying long enough for tea, but he needed something to do.
“I learned a lesson that day, and not the one Father intended.” Rigsby sighed and pulled at his neck with one hand. “This isn’t why I came here tonight.”
“I’m sure it isn’t, but since it’s come up, why don’t you finish your story?”
Rigsby’s eyebrows rose. “You want to know what I learned?”
“Tell me what I missed.”
He shook his head. “That would take all night. No, from that day on I questioned everything Father said.”
Aaron stilled. “Everything?”
Rigsby nodded. “I’ve never been the son he wanted, but he couldn’t complain about it because I’ve also been the son he couldn’t criticize. I made sure my grades were good and I didn’t get into trouble. I took care to make the right friends, but not be so popular as to anger the wrong people.”
“Sounds exemplary.”
“Sounds not like you. He complains about you. A lot. I think he needs to feel that the world is trying to punish him. He’s hoping one day you’ll punch him.”
“What?” Aaron dropped the pot he’d filled with water for tea. His leg got soaked from the splash, but he didn’t care.
“He only admitted that to me once, after you’d finished school and he lowered your quarterly allowance. He thought that would be enough to prompt you to do something, but you just took it.” Rigsby shrugged. “After that, I tried rebelling against everything, hoping that could be my way to finally make him happy. Mother hated it. It didn’t work, so I stopped.”
“Stopped rebelling?”
“Stopped caring. At the end of my life, I won’t answer to Lord Lindbury and neither will you.”
Aaron filled the pot again and placed it on top of the cookstove. “You’ve got it figured out then, have you?”
Shaking his head, Rigsby laughed. “Hardly. That’s why I was in London a few weeks ago. No matter how many times I tell myself it is more important to be a man God would be proud of, I keep going back. And I keep getting disappointed.”
“What are you wanting?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s why I sought you out. I’m hoping I’ll see what I’ve been missing.”
“Is it working?”
“No.”
A slow ripple crossed the surface of the water as it began to heat. “I don’t know what it was like growing up in that house with Lord Lindbury, and I don’t think I want to know.” Aaron glanced around the room. He would never see this place the same way again. “You don’t want to know what it was really like in that cottage either.”
Aaron’s gaze fell once more on the open Bible. “Neither of us is going to be the man we want to be if we hold on to the past.”
Maybe there was something to this idea of talking things through, because all of a sudden it made sense. God did not define people by their birth but by their hearts. When a man entered into a relationship with Jesus, there wasn’t anyone else involved. Not a father or a mother or a friend. It was just him and God. What if, instead of trying to imitate what