They’d strapped him to the bed.
Peter wasn’t going to escape. Oh, how Esther wanted to scream that—the man could barely move. A sling strapped his right arm to his body—his shoulder had been dislocated, the three ribs beneath it fractured. And a truth embedded deep inside her told her that something about the report from the guards—and the other prisoners—didn’t sit quite right. Peter, escape?
And, even as the accusation gnawed at her, she’d told herself it had nothing to do with her. He wouldn’t escape for her, would he?
She ignored the sweet, forbidden swirl of emotions churned by that thought.
Still, as Esther buckled on the leather straps, securing Peter’s left wrist to the bed—per Dr. O’Grady’s terse orders when he’d shown up for his shift—the truth chewed at her insides, brittle and sharp.
Peter was a prisoner. Of war. The enemy.
However, watching him sleep the last two nights, his dark blond hair soft and catching the barest hint of dawn as it fell over the bandage around his head, his face stripped of expression, his bare chest rising and falling under the bandages around his torso—no, he didn’t bear any resemblance to an enemy.
In fact, she had this insane, terrible urge to curl up beside him.
Not that anyone would know. Dr. O’Grady sequestered him in a private room, although the guards had talked him out of demanding an armed man at the door. After all, they only had a flimsy snow fence penning in the remaining able-bodied 136 prisoners down at the marsh. And with Peter strapped to the bed, he wasn’t going anywhere.
Even if he had —supposedly— tried to escape.
She glanced at the clock as she sat up in the chair, rubbing her hands down her arms, humming softly. Three-fifty-five. Five more stolen moments—then she’d return to her desk, do another walk through the wards, then sit by Linus’s bed until he awoke.
She hoped Linus wouldn’t have another nightmare. She’d begun to fear his sleep. And in the daytime, well, the demons that ran through his mind in the dark roamed his face in the haunted wells under his eyes. He sometimes—too often—stared at her without seeing her. And not once had he asked for Sadie.
Not that she’d bring Sadie in to him. After all, it was a hospital, and she was too young to visit the infirm. Still, the lack of Sadie in Linus’s thoughts nagged at Esther.
If he wanted Esther, surely that meant he wanted his daughter too?
Peter stirred, a groan, then a breath that drew deep, caught. A wince crossed his face.
“Shh… Don’t move. Go back to sleep.” She said it so softly, he couldn’t possibly have heard it, yet his eyes opened.
She stilled, struck with the urge to run. Instead she allowed herself a smile, one that she didn’t have to fabricate.
He blinked at her, as if shifting her image from his dreams to reality. Then he, too, smiled. And something about it heated her clear through. Oh, he had devastation in his smile. And his voice, low and caressing her bones. “I knew an angel was camped by my bed at night.”
She wanted to roll her eyes, but, well, the line charmed her.
“Is that a blush, nurse?”
“I think you need to go back to sleep, soldier.”
“I am sleeping. This is my dream, and I’m in charge.” But he said it with a smile. “You are so beautiful, you know that?” Then he reached out to her, his wrist jangling against the bed frame. His smile fell. “Oops, I forgot.”
“I’m sorry. The doctor said—”
“I know what he said. That other nurse told me I nearly died. If it hadn’t been for you, I might have. How did you know how to apply an occlusive dressing? My lung would have collapsed if it weren’t for you.”
What nurse told him? Caroline, probably, who checked in on him while Esther sat with Linus. She couldn’t scrub from her memory Caroline’s expression as they wheeled Peter out of surgery to repair his damaged lung, and into the recovery room. She’d met Esther at the door, grabbed her by the exhausted arms, stared her down, and said, “This is him, isn’t it?”
Rosemary had brushed past them, on duty as a scrub nurse, and had shot her a look that turned Esther’s response to bile. She swallowed it down and nodded.
But the horror of having both Linus and Peter in the same hospital, separated by about ten steps in the corridor, followed her home even as she curled up to Sadie, drawing her petite body into the well of her embrace.
She had to let Peter go. Had to tell him about Linus and Sadie. Had to tell him good-bye.
She had breathed into Sadie’s soft skin, the fragrance of her hot sleep like perfume. It would be best this way.
But no words came. Even as she sat next to him in the hollow moments of the night, nothing came.
Nothing but the urge to uncuff him and run with him somewhere, anywhere, Sadie skipping between them.
“Who did this to you, Peter?” She watched him work circulation back into his fingers—the ones half-hidden by his bandage, the others in the cuffs.
Peter shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters—they beat you nearly within an inch of your life. They should be punished.”
“And then what? They clamp down on the camp? They move us away from Roosevelt, maybe to Fort McCoy?”
His words scraped away any last vestiges of fantasy she harbored. Yes, they could move them, and she might never see him again.
Worse, he might be beaten again, and this time left to die on the trauma room table. She didn’t even know how to begin thanking Dr. Sullivan for tromping in, sleep in the creases around his eyes, willing to save Peter’s life.
She wanted to be able to save lives. To do surgery, close damaged lungs, stitch up lacerations of the kidneys, removed damaged spleens. She wanted to be the one to decide whether to show up in the middle of the night, and to command the respect of nurses—instead of being silenced to stand on the sidelines, forbidden to speak unless spoken to.
“I nearly died seeing you so hurt,” she said, her voice so shallow she might not have spoken. But oh, despite the ache in saying that, it felt like the lancing of a wound. She breathed out, put her hand to her mouth, blinking back the prick of her eyes.
“Sort of how I feel watching you sit there, so much pain in your eyes, it hurts worse than breathing in and out.” His face softened, something so kind she had to look away. “What is it, Esther? What is it that kept you from writing to me, kept you from coming to see me, but that drives you to my bedside in the darkness of the past two nights?”
She closed her eyes. I’m engaged. I have a daughter. I shouldn’t be here. The words clogged in her throat. She shook her head.
The chain on his bed rattled, and she opened her eyes to see him reaching for her through the shackles.
Oh, she shouldn’t… But, almost without her permission, her hand found his. He wrapped his around hers, folded his fingers between hers, held on.
They fit well. And warmth shot up her arm into her body. He tightened his hold even as she cupped her hand over her forehead, bent her head, and wept.
Hold on, Esther. Hold onto me. He held the words inside, longing to deliver them to her, longing to rip off the cursed buckle and draw her into his arms. But something about the way she curled into herself, the way she cupped her hand over her eyes, as if holding on to his hand was the furthest she could extend herself—
It hit him like a brick—harder than anything Fritz had dealt out.
She felt guilty.
Yes—her posture, bent over, protecting herself as if waiting for some assault—he recognized the posture of shame.
Oh, he knew it too well. I think I brought them here.
His mother had stared at Peter with a look of coiled horror, her voice so slim it cut through him like a knife. Who did you bring?
The SS. I recognize them from the café where father and I were arguing.
Then he’d curled into just that ball.
“I did this, didn’t I?” he said now, on a thin slice of despair.
She shook her head.
“I did—only I don’t know what it is. Please, Esther. I want to help.”
“You can’t help me, Peter. For a while, I thought….” Her breath emerged so serrated, the shards of it made him wince.
She made to tug her hand away, but he held on. “No. Esther. Whatever it is—I want to know.”
She looked up at him then, a look so terrible, her eyes reddened, her cheeks glistening, that the ache in it swiped his breath from his chest. “No, you don’t.”
“I do—is it me? Is it the kiss—I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have let it happen. But I meant everything I said. The war’s over, and we’ll be let out soon—”
A knot of desperation had gripped his chest ever since she’d taken his hand, the kind of desperation that could see the future and told him that if he let go, she might just flee from the room. And, prisoner that he was, he couldn’t run after her.
Nor, maybe, should he, if he was going to cause her this much pain.
Oh, what had he done, dreaming up a future for them? Like she might be some sort of reward—
“It’s not the war.” She wiped her cheeks with the meat of her hand, first one, then the other. “I need to get back to the nurses’ station.”
“Please! Esther—”
“I’m getting married!”
He stopped moving. Stopped thinking. Just went numb, his entire body stripped. “Married?”
She yanked her hand away from his—he’d relaxed his grip just enough to let her.
“Yes. The man you saved in Germany is my fiancé.”
“Linus?”
She was blinking now, looking past him, out the window to the dawn. “Yes. Linus Hahn. He wasn’t my friend. He’s my fiancé.”
Something about the way… Is. He’s my fiancé. “He’s not dead.” The words tasted like char coming out of his mouth. “He lived.”
She nodded, but the way her eyes died made him want to weep. “There is something you’re not telling me.”
Her beautiful face crumpled, just for a moment, and she cupped her hand to her mouth.
“Do you love him?”
She closed her eyes.
Then, shook her head.
A fist released in his chest, and he hated that he wanted to cry out from it. She didn’t love him. She didn’t love him. “I—don’t understand.”
“We have a daughter.”
She said it while looking away from him, down at his shackled hand, still open for hers. “You have a…daughter?”
She nodded. Then cupped her hand over her eyes, as if unable to look at the past. “We had a night together—a stupid, mistaken night before Linus left for the war. I don’t know what I was thinking. Just… I probably thought it wouldn’t matter. I didn’t love him, even then. I knew it. But I let him talk me into the back seat of his car—”
“His car?” Oh, he didn’t mean the tone, except anger boiled through him, and he almost welcomed the screws of pain his quick intake of breath coiled through his chest. “He made love to you in the back of his car?”
“Stop, please. I can hardly think it myself. I… And no, he didn’t make love to me. He—he didn’t love me either.”
This was why God had shackled him to the bed. So he couldn’t rise up and wrap his hands around this man’s dishonorable neck.
But—wait. He’d been writing—courting, even, a betrothed woman. He swiped that thought aside, unable to face it. Or the truth that things might not have been different if he’d known.
So much for being faithful to God’s principles.
“You got pregnant.”
She nodded, finally lifting her face to his. Oh, she was so beautiful, her silky blond hair rolled up around her nightingale hat, those curved lips, the way her eyes, blue, or even green in the early light—reached out to him. He held out his hand again. Please.
She slid hers into it, staring at his grip in hers. “I was dismissed from the Red Cross. I didn’t have a job or money, and when I wrote to my parents…” She turned his hand over, traced the swell of his veins in his hands. “So, I wrote to Linus, and he told me to come here, to live with his parents.”
“They don’t like you.”
She looked up, blinking her beautiful blue eyes again. “Not much. But, see, I’ve disgraced them. So, yes. I’m marrying their son, who has returned from war.”
She sighed, a shudder of breath through her. Outside, the birds had begun to chirrup, morning drifting into his room. He had imagined such a moment like this—seeing Esther in the morning light, her hand in his. Perhaps not exactly this moment, but—
No. She was engaged. He let her go.
“What am I missing, Esther? You have a man who loves you, a child, and while you don’t love him…” Although, wasn’t that enough? She shouldn’t be shackled to marry a man she didn’t love. Or perhaps, well, she had acted as if she loved him, made a child with him… He stared at the buckle holding him to the bed.
She looked up, apparently misunderstanding, because she nodded. “I know—I should be thrilled—but, see…the letter.”
The letter. “The one I sent?”
She nodded then shook her head, and her expression came back to him, stripped.
“What was in the letter, Esther?”
She rubbed her hands together in her lap. “Linus told me that he wanted nothing to do with me, or Sadie.”
Oh.
“And then you wrote to me.” He wasn’t sure why those words burned coming out, but they did, searing through him.
“No. I wrote to you before I knew what he wrote in the letter. Because I suspected the truth, that he didn’t love me, and I had to know.” She drew a breath. “I had to know if he talked about me…” It seemed she forced her smile. “The way a man talks about someone he loves.”
Someone he loves. Peter saw Linus in the mud, then, listened to him talk of home, of his friends, playing football, of a redheaded girl back home. Yes, he had talked of someone as if he loved her. But it hadn’t been Esther. Not once had he mentioned her as his fiancé.
He looked at her hands, the way they wrung together in her lap.
“He didn’t talk about you that way.”
She nodded, a sort of sadness on her face. “I know. And, heaven help me, I was relieved.” She blew out a long breath. “Relieved, Peter. I was sort of set free. And by then, I had started to…”
She looked up, her smile quick, like lightning. “To care for you.”
Oh. Now he had to look away, into the rose gold of the morning. But… “I don’t understand then. Why does he want you now?” He turned back to her, and she was watching him, something tender on her face.
“I don’t know. He was so wounded. I’m thinking that he feels trapped. Maybe even like his life is over. I think he came back a different person, even wrecked, and maybe he thinks I’m the only one who might understand.”
Wrecked. “You do, don’t you?”
“I do understand looking in the mirror and not recognizing the person there. I understand losing yourself inside your sins. I understand needing to hold on to someone because they see you as you want to be seen.”
Her eyes flickered over to his. Again, that flash of smile.
Yes, he understood that too. Especially the part about being seen beyond the man in the POW uniform, under gunpoint. Perhaps this, more than anything, had filled his long nights with hope.
“You don’t have to marry him, Esther.”
She shook her head. “Yes, I do. And you know it.”
Oh. He did know it. And that’s what hurt, probably the most. He knew it and hated it. And that part of him—the desperate, wounded man inside—that was the man that spoke. “Why? So you can work off your sins?”
“I’m trying to make it right!” She cut her voice to low.
This, too, he understood. Understood facing the wretched truth and the scrawling of one’s name on a dotted line in order to atone for one’s mistakes.
Understood that sometimes the choices weren’t about love or happiness. Sometimes they were about life. His father’s life.
Sadie’s life.
May the God whom you continually serve deliver you. His father’s words as Peter stepped on the military transport rang through him.
But it seemed, suddenly, as if God had delivered Peter right into prison.
He tasted the bitterness of those words even as they scraped through him.
No. God had kept him alive as he’d stumbled into the smoke and chaos of battle, faithful to his Hippocratic oath. God had brought him back to the land he’d loved, given him a glimpse of safety. And, for some reason, God had helped him save Linus Hahn.
He swallowed down, again, the bitter taste of betrayal. No.
Still, it burned inside him. “Please, Esther. Don’t… Wait. See, the war will end, and I’ll come back, and…”
She shook her head, a stiffness in her expression. “No. I don’t have a choice. Linus is my fate—”
“Linus is your atonement!”
She flinched, but he didn’t care.
“You’re marrying him because you are trying to erase what happened! You’re trying to find forgiveness. But don’t you see—you already have it.”
“I don’t have it!” Her tone slapped him, but he didn’t recoil. Just bled for her, watching her unravel as she stood up, whirled away from him, clamped her hands around her waist. “Maybe you don’t understand what it feels like to walk around always bleeding inside. To see the shape of your sins tucked beside you so desperately sweet, and yet know what this incredible love cost you? I haven’t felt whole since that night. Well, until…” She turned, then, sharp. “I wasn’t in love with you, Peter, I just thought I was. I was in love with the thought that someone might not see me the way I did. But—that’s not going to happen.”
It could happen. It did happen. “Esther, you don’t solve the problem of your sins by trying to forgive yourself. You have to let God forgive—”
“I have to marry Linus. I have no other choice. I made my mistakes, and now I have to live with them. It doesn’t matter what I want—it’s the right thing to do.” She cut her voice low. “And don’t talk to me about God. He doesn’t love a woman like me.”
Her small words severed from him the desperate man trying to hold on to what he’d wanted.
He suddenly realized, this conversation wasn’t about his heart… but Esther’s soul. Perhaps, in fact, God had delivered him into prison for just this moment.
His voice softened, and he put a caress in it. “Esther, He loves you more than you can imagine.”
She flinched again, and he wanted to cry out.
“Listen to me. Don’t despise the grace given to you by staring at your sin. You must turn around and keep your eyes on the face of love. The face of grace. This is where you’ll find forgiveness.”
She closed her eyes as if his words pained her.
Please, God, I’m sorry I despised my imprisonment. It’s Yours for Your glory.
“Esther, you’re not lost. God knows exactly where you are. You just have to stop and let Him find you.”
“I thought He had, with you.”
He caught her eyes, those beautiful eyes that softened with a smile. He held his hand up, spread his fingers open. She debated for a moment then slipped her hand into his. He closed his fingers around hers. “Maybe… Maybe we could just hold on to that, for one more moment.”
She sat down in the chair, and her face softened even as a tear dripped off her chin.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—of course I care for you, Peter.”
“Shh… It doesn’t matter. I can’t matter.” But he took her words in, captured them.
They sat there in the silence of the morning, the gold sliding over the speckled gray and red terrazzo floor.
Finally, she got up, adjusted his covers, then leaned over and pressed a gentle kiss on his cheekbone, right below his eye. She smelled of a floral perfume, something he might remember, later.
He smiled into her touch, glad, for at least this moment, that he couldn’t sweep her into his arms.
“Be safe, Peter,” she said quietly. “I’ll never be sorry I met you.”
Then she turned, and her intake of breath stopped Peter, made him cut his gaze to the door.
In the outline of the morning stood a nurse, her red hair caught back in a snood, her hands fisted into boulders in her apron pockets. And she wore an expression not far from the one Fritz had given him in the yard.
Changing his world with a look.