Chapter 4

She had to leave, to get away. The walls were closing in on her with a suffocating persistence.

“Take the pictures,” Mr. Mendelsohn had always instructed, “and then leave.”

Get away. Before you become a part of the deceased’s story, tied to the family with emotional threads that became more entangled the longer you mingled.

Thea pushed past a couple entering the Coyle home, curiosity etched onto their faces with the boldness of an onlooker visiting a circus. Here to ponder the freaks, the objects of rumor and mystery. There was no grief, no empathy, and certainly no genuine condolences. The Coyles were alone.

Tears were not what Thea battled as she hurried down the stone path between the lavender and the wildflowers. It was an ache, sharp and dull at the same moment. Poignant right now, but a foe she’d long held hands with and grown used to its insistent throb. It was the emptiness forged from the moment she’d watched her mother walk away, never to return. Those persistent questions Who am I? Why am I alone? that dogged her soul. Watching anyone aimless and unclaimed, staring after a person who’d left them, upon whom they’d relied, loved, needed—

The collision was hard. Hard enough to cause him to stumble backward, instinctively reaching for her arms but slamming them against his shed. Thea’s body pressed against his, stunned by the impact of running into Simeon Coyle with the force of a woman fleeing her own demons.

It was a long moment, silent and strange. His narrowed gray eyes searching deep into hers, the edges crinkled in study as though he wasn’t surprised by the collision at all. His hands embraced her upper arms with a firm grip, and he made no motion to push her from him, from the breadth of his chest, from the wisp of air that separated their faces.

“You’re not all right,” Simeon Coyle observed. The low tone of his voice, rusty and rarely used, sent shivers down her spine even as Thea sensed herself meld even closer to him.

She was dizzy.

Caught off guard.

She was hypnotized by a man who hibernated in a shed. Locked away like someone with no senses.

“I’m fine,” Thea breathed.

Simeon Coyle blinked. Long lashes dusted his chiseled cheekbones before raising again.

“You’re shaking,” he stated, studying her face.

“Yes. No—I’m fine.” Warmth spread through her. The curiosity of leaning against a man’s chest, smelling the cinnamon on his breath, stunned her. Now, reality began to penetrate her stupor, and she struggled to push away from him.

He released her.

“I’m sorry.” Thea smoothed her dress, staring down at her shoes in embarrassment and not much different had they been caught stealing kisses behind a woodshed.

There was no answer, but she could hear him breathe.

“I’m sorry also for your loss,” she added, lifting her eyes.

He offered an awkward, sad smile, as if unsure how to accept condolences. His eyes shifted toward the house, toward the gawkers come to stare at his dead sister’s body.

Thea backed away another step.

Simeon didn’t follow her. Instead, he seemed to consider the house, the funeral, and all it implied. His hand reached for the door to his shed, and he opened it.

Before Thea could react, before she could say a word to keep him before her, to offer her companionship to the house or express more condolences, Simeon disappeared into the shed.

The door closed.

Firm.

It was a stunning shift from the concerned man who’d held her against him just moments before to a man whose lost expression was a perfect mirror of her own.

The letter stared up at her, the scrolling penmanship staggered and wavy, indicative of the author’s shaky hand. Thea was already more than a bit disturbed by Mrs. Brummel’s ghost story of yesterday—this Misty Wayfair, a wandering spirit—and her discomforting time at Mary Coyle’s funeral. Why she tortured herself by slipping the well-read letter from her valise and opening it, Thea couldn’t explain. It was a repeated torture, almost addictive in its picking at the pain while reviving a thin splinter of hope. There would be no comfort in the words, no solace. Only fuel to continue the slow, ever-present coals smoldering in her soul.

“You were twelve.”

Those three words split Thea’s life into two broken halves. Life before the Mendelsohns and life after. She perched on the edge of the bed in the stark boardinghouse room, her weight causing the mattress to sag.

“It was our Christian duty to take you.”

Her eyes skimmed the words. At twelve, the Mendelsohns had whisked her from the only home she could recall, and her new life had begun.

A nervous prick traversed with rapidity up Thea’s spine as she folded the last letter from Mrs. Mendelsohn—a letter she’d found after the woman died—and jammed it back into her valise. Her breaths coming in short, quick sniffs, Thea bolted from the bed to the washbasin on the stand by the bureau. Lifting the heavy, white crock, she poured tepid water into the matching bowl.

She splashed water on her face. The wetness jolted Thea from thoughts that trapped her in a spiral of remembrances. Tugging her downward, threatening to become more alive than Misty Wayfair’s spirit. More alive than her own rapidly throbbing heart.

Thea turned to the mirror on the bureau, its edges blackened with age, the oak frame that held it in place scrolled and swooped around it. Water dripped down her cheeks. Deep, brown eyes stared back at her. She was Dorothea Reed. That was, for the most part, all she knew. Thea reached up and pushed light brown hair away from her face. Straight hair, unimpressive and mousy, barely held in place by pins.

Mrs. Brummel might be worried that Thea would unintentionally encounter Misty Wayfair in the forest. But Thea knew the only one whose soul she ever questioned was that of a woman who shared her features. A vague, blurry image in Thea’s mind. A feminine voice with no distinguishable tone. Perhaps kind, perhaps not. But the one who’d given Thea her name, Dorothea, and left her on the steps of the orphan home. She was why Thea had come to Pleasant Valley, after all. To find her, or to lay her to rest for good.

Most people did not wish their mother dead. But Thea did. More than anything she’d ever wanted. She wished to lay the woman to rest along with the questions, the betrayal, and worst of all, the series of circumstances her mother had put into play the day she left a little girl to sit on a stair and then walked away.