of tiny feet, tiny fingers.
“He knew that I would never let her go,” Molly said. “There was only one way. He thought I might believe him.”
Tom considered other questions, other challenges and hopes, but what would truly help her now that everything was final? Still he wanted, for himself, to cut the blackest parts away.
“Cora,” Molly said. “I don’t remember touching her. I loved her more than anyone and never even saw her.”
Tom held her as she cried, curling her toward him with an arm around her waist and his other hand soft upon her hair. He felt her ear. Her face was at his chest, dampening his shirt. She hugged him forcefully and painfully, her fingertips digging at the ribs around his back. He lost his balance, pulled her down, and lay with her beside him while her teeth, bared to sob, pressed against his collarbone.
She clawed at him and seemed afraid of slipping from his side, and not since the morning he had caught her in the river did it seem so imperative to keep her in his grasp. He wished that he could quiet her by swallowing her sounds and worried that her crying could be heard throughout the tavern.
Molly’s forehead and nose smudged around his lips. He tasted salt and felt her mouth gasping open on his cheek. He hoped she wouldn’t roll and notice his arousal. He did everything to weaken it, remembering her story’s bleakest moments as he hugged her, but her voice came through, pink and sweet within her sobs, and she was emanating heat and pressing with her bosom. They clung with sweaty clothes, and loss and reassurance, and the dark made the ceiling and the bed disappear. They were rhythmically together and he held her till she calmed.
When she finally collapsed and he believed she was sleeping, Tom listened to her breathe. Her nose whistled faintly and her chest fell and rose. He thought about her lungs and all the hidden parts within her. His skin was so moist and his muscles so drained it felt as if he, instead of Molly, had survived a bout of weeping. After thinking through her story many times out of order, he was vibrantly awake and felt the night sprawl around him. She had curled up fetal in the dark, very small, and when he tried to kiss her forehead, he missed and got her eye. She stirred but didn’t wake. He could have lain with her for hours.
Instead he went to the door and left her in the room. The air was fresher downstairs, surprisingly so until he remembered the gaping hole in the storeroom wall. Ichabod had blocked it up with crates, more or less, but Tom had never left the tavern so exposed after dark. Otherwise the place was tight and everything was still.
Bess and Ichabod had closed up early in his absence and retired upstairs. Nabby opened her door.
“Me,” Tom whispered.
She retreated into her room like a spider to its cranny.
Tom unlocked the bar, poured a generous cup of rum, and wondered whether anyone—Nabby, Bess, the others—knew that he and Molly had been secretly together on his bed. What would Abigail think? What would Pitt really learn, riding out tomorrow for the traveler from Liberty? He’d learn she had a husband and believe it to be true. Plus the traveler had seen her and would likely tell others. People might come looking after the curious disappearance of the Smiths and John Summer, and no amount of reasoned explanation would suffice. Molly was a liar and a runaway. The daughter of General Bell. Pregnant out of wedlock, her baby dead and missing. Someone must have come upon Nicholas’s body and it was likely she was wanted by authorities already. Now that Tom knew, he was harboring a fugitive.
He quaffed his rum and locked the bar. He didn’t know what to do.
Boards creaked above him: Molly coming down. She had her own distinct sound as she moved through the tavern, more gingerly than Bess and less blundering than Ichabod. A slice of moon had risen, lighting her faintly when she entered. She was badly disarrayed: skirts crumpled, shoulders narrowing, hair on one side flattened to her head while the other side moved, staticky and mussed.
He went to her—he didn’t know a soul he needed more—and kissed her so hard the force hurt his chin. Molly arched back, mumbling in his mouth. He caught her round the waist and took her struggles for