flew to the hard shoulder, I didn’t care. My ears were rushing with the sound of my heart.
He pulled up, and I barely managed to open the door before I was spewing up what little I’d eaten for breakfast.
As my body expelled all the sustenance I’d managed to consume in the hospital, I suddenly understood something that had always escaped me.
Why Momma had done it.
This pain, this agony...I couldn’t stand it. I wasn’t sure I could deal with it.
For five months, he’d been my everything.
Now?
He was nothing. How could he be anything else? He was married. And not to me.
Sobs racked me as I puked, and when the car jerked, I realized Linden had climbed out of the vehicle.
When he pressed behind me, his hand on my back, he murmured, “There, there, miss. I’m so sorry.” He passed me a bottle of water, which I took and rinsed my mouth out with. It felt awkward spitting it out, but he’d just seen me vomiting, and I couldn’t bear the taste, so I released it as daintily as I could.
I felt like a mess. One big, snotty rag of despair, and he surprised me by taking me in his arms and hugging me.
At first, I wasn’t sure what he was doing.
But before I could tense up, he whispered, “We were surprised, Mrs. Linden and I, by the announcement. Every time I saw you two together, I told her about it. I’ve never seen two people in love as much as the pair of you.” He shook his head, and his words started the torrent of tears again, so he patted my back. “You’ll get over him, miss. You will. But, in the meantime, it’s going to hurt something fierce.
“Mrs. Linden, Janice, she’ll help you when she can. It helps to have a woman to talk to.”
My face felt sore from the tears that had fallen from me, and I knew I’d drenched his jacket coat. “I’m sorry. You’re all wet,” I whispered miserably, my shoulders hunched over as I tried to deal with my new reality.
He shrugged. “Don’t worry. We all need a shoulder to cry on sometimes.”
My mouth wobbled, and though I guarded my secrets fiercely, I couldn’t stop the words from falling. Just like I couldn’t stop the tears from burning my eyes. “It hurts.”
“I know.” He sighed. “Janice will help, I promise.”
“I don’t know her. She doesn’t know me.”
Another shrug. “Better to talk to someone who you can speak the truth with than to bottle it up inside.”
I bit my bottom lip. “True. How do—”
“I saw you together, not often, but enough,” he repeated. “That day at the community center, when Master Adam gave you his gift. I’ve never seen anything like it.” His brow puckered. “Trust me, and Janice will confirm it, I’m not a romantic, miss. Not at all. She’d like me to be. She’d be happy if I gave her flowers every day and left her little notes, and maybe I should. She deserves a better husband, a better man at her side, but even I saw what was between you.
“Even I couldn’t fail to see what you had.” He shook his head. “I thought I was going mad at first. But it was like you were connected.” He shrugged again. “I told Janice, and she thought I was mad too. But I told her enough that it stuck with her. So when the master moved out and married that Lopez girl, she was just as perplexed by it as me.”
“Robert said she’s pregnant.”
Linden tensed. “That would explain it. The family is Catholic.”
Confusion furrowed my brow. “They are?”
“Yes. Very devout too.”
How didn’t I know that?
“Adam never said—”
But Robert’s need to atone for Cain’s sins suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense.
“Why would he? It’s not something a boy talks about with his sweetheart, is it?”
My lips curved at that before, at the ends, they turned down. “I’m not his sweetheart.”
“You were. But he’s honorable.”
“Adam didn’t think you liked him.” I swallowed. “He didn’t think anyone liked him.”
“We weren’t all enamored with Master Cain, but it isn’t something you can tell your boss, is it? That you think their child is a vindictive little hell spawn?” Linden winced as he squeezed my shoulder. “Truly, the only way the family would have registered his true nature was by what happened to you.” He cleared his throat. “They say he held you under water—is that the truth?”