Crossing Tinker's Knob by Cooper Inglath

Author:Cooper, Inglath [Cooper, Inglath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fence Free Entertainment, LLC
Published: 2014-04-18T03:00:00+00:00

38

Clear Signs

“Sister – if all this is true, what could I do or undo?”

― Sophocles

Now

Martha heard the truck pull into the driveway. She left the sheet on Emmy’s bed unfinished and joined her at the window where they both watched Becca get out and Aaron walk up from the barn to meet her. The exchange between them was short, but the tension between them impossible to miss.

For a moment, an old sense of duty rallied inside her, and she considered going downstairs and talking to Becca about where she’d been today. But she knew, simply from the look on her daughter’s face, that wherever it was, it had involved Matt Griffith.

On the heels of obligation, though, came a wave of weariness so intense that she had to sit on the chair beside the window, her limbs suffused with a heavy tiredness whose origin she thought more mental than physical.

All these years, and they thought she did not understand. That she was simply set in her ways, and had no idea what it was to want something she could not have.

But they were wrong.

She knew. Too well, she knew. Far better than either Becca or Jacob would ever believe.

She quickly finished Emmy’s bed and guided her back to it, propping her pillows up against the headboard and then leaving her with a book by her side, knowing she would never read it.

Martha left the room and went to her own, closing the door and staring hard at the cedar chest at the foot of her four-poster bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually let herself look back, convincing herself there was nothing to be gained from it. Some pains never dulled, though, no matter how many years passed.

She got up from the chair and knelt down in front of the chest, her right knee cracking with the effort. She turned the latch and opened the lid, running a hand across the carefully folded quilts on top. Her mother had made these, using scraps from the dresses she’d sewn for Martha and her sisters. She lifted one and pressed her face to it, imagining that they still held the wonderful smell of the family kitchen where her mother had gone back and forth between cooking daily meals and working on the quilts she had loved.

She lifted two more rows from the chest and then saw the small box at the very bottom. It, too, was made of cedar, a gift she supposed she should have given away a long time ago. Something she had never been able to bring herself to do.

To her knowledge, Daniel had never seen the box. But what reason would he have had to rifle through her quilt chest? Daniel had trusted her without question. With this admission came a pang of guilt for the fact that her secret had outlived her marriage. Somehow, it seemed doubly wrong that Daniel had died without ever knowing she had loved another man.

She opened the lid to the box, the letters and photos exactly as she had left them.

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