It wasn’t enough. But it was something. “Thank you. I’ll relieve Abby. I’m sure you want to say good-night.”
Nathan’s condition hadn’t changed when she changed places with Abby in the wagon bed.
She prayed over him as she settled into the wagon. Her heart was fluttering, pulse thrumming.
He moaned again, his head turning toward her. Was he rousing?
His eyes didn’t open. But his lips formed a word.
“Beth…”
* * *
Nathan burned. Had he died and now was being punished for his sins?
His entire body was weighted down as though he’d been buried in a rock slide.
He rolled his head to the side, seeking some relief. The movement seemed to seep all of his energy away. And it didn’t help. The oppressive heat and darkness remained.
From far away—a memory, or reality?—he heard a laugh. It sounded like Beth.
“Beth!” he called out for her, but in his weakness he couldn’t be sure if anything emerged from his mouth at all.
A memory flickered through his consciousness, a remembrance of her as a teen, looking over her shoulder and laughing. Probably at him. He’d always been able to make his sister laugh. Until the end.
Another memory flitted through him, but this one stuck. The awful moment when he’d found her crumpled in a pool of her own blood. One hand protectively clutching her stomach—he hadn’t found out until later that she’d been trying to protect the babe in her womb from the violent blows its father had delivered.
She’d asked Nathan for help earlier, asked him for money to buy a train ticket. She’d been desperate for escape, willing to go anywhere.
“Beth,” he cried out again, the name ripped from his lips, from his very soul.
She had been the only good thing in his life.
And he’d failed her.
If this was the end of him, he deserved this torture, the all-consuming darkness. Why hadn’t he taken Beth away himself? He’d been younger, but he still could’ve protected her from that brute who was her husband. But she’d been afraid, too afraid to stay close. She’d wanted distance.
And with no education and no connections to recommend him, jobs were scarce. He hadn’t been able to round up funds in time to save her.
She’d died because of him.
“Forgive me…”
But she’d gone, or her memory had, and only the darkness remained.
What would her son have been like? Or daughter? Beth had been full of life and laughter. She’d always known how to tease him out of a bad mood. She’d been the only one to tell him he didn’t have to turn out like their father—a tyrant with an affinity for moonshine and a horrible temper—or the man she had married young to escape. She’d believed in Nathan.
And look what he’d done to her. He’d failed.
He burned hotter. Hotter. Until he felt as if he would incinerate from the inside out.
He just wanted the torment to end. Wanted to forget. Wanted blessed darkness.
Wanted to end this.
“I forgive you…”
He turned his head, searching for the source of the almost ethereal whisper.
“Beth?”
Had she come to ease his passing?
But then he felt something through the haze of darkness and heat. Soft fingers gripping his hand so hard he believed she could pull him back from the brink of death.
“I forgive you,” the female voice said again. Not Beth. The cadence was wrong.
But something inside him responded, opening like a flower to the sun. Some of the weight—not all—on his chest eased. No one had ever forgiven him before.
* * *
The first rays of sunlight burst over the horizon as Nathan’s fever broke and he became drenched in sweat.
Emma would never know what woke her in that darkest part of night. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep at all, but exhaustion and worry had overcome her. She’d woken with a cramp in her neck from being bent at a wrong angle. Her left foot had been completely asleep.
But those small pains had disappeared instantly when she realized that his fever must have spiked. His breath had gone shallow, with a rasp that frightened her.
He’d murmured a woman’s name—Beth—several times, finally begging for forgiveness in a tortured whisper.
She’d been afraid he was on the verge of death. Not knowing what else to do, she had grabbed his hand and told him she forgave him.
And his fever had broken.
Now she found a dry cloth and mopped the moisture on his brow.
When her hand passed over his face, in the growing light she watched as his eyes opened.
“Hello,” she whispered, almost afraid that she was dreaming this moment.
“Seems like you’d have given up on me by now, Miss Hewitt.” His voice was raspy and she fumbled for a cup of water even as that awful racking cough took him.
She held his shoulders until it had passed, helped him to take a few sips of water, mopped his brow because the effort had made sweat bead there again.
When he’d settled again, she looked him straight in the face.
“I never give up.” She let the gravity of the moment hold in a pregnant pause and then said, “And after all that’s passed between us in the last days, I think we’re beyond using each other’s surnames, Nathan.”
One corner of his lips twitched, the closest she’d seen him come to smiling. “Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly.
Or maybe she imagined the meekness as his illness forced him to whisper.
“Good.”
And it was good. She hadn’t lost this man, who’d become more than an acquaintance. Did she dare to call him a friend?
Later that morning, Emma was able to leave the wagon and assist Rachel with the breakfast preparations. Her fears had been unfounded. Nathan had revived.
“You’re humming,” Rachel observed.
Emma looked up from where she flipped bacon in the fry pan. “Was I?”
“Yes. You were.” Rachel’s pointed gaze seemed to demand Emma admit to something, but she couldn’t imagine what.
She let her eyes linger on the landscape of tall, brown summer grasses before she returned her eyes to the pot. Did even the sunlight seem brighter this morning? “I suppose I am relieved that Mr. Reed is faring better.”
“He is?” Ben’s voice rang out as he joined them.
“His fever broke just before dawn,” Emma told her brother.
“Good.” Ben reached for the plate Rachel extended to him. “I won’t have to send someone riding after a doctor.”
“His cough still worries me.”
“Sally Littleton said she’s seen pneumonia develop from measles,” Rachel said. The thirtysomething mother was one of their neighbors in the wagon train and had been friendly since they’d left Independence.
Pneumonia.