She painted all night. She’d never done that before. Never needed to or cared enough. But she’d needed this. It was full morning when she stopped, her hands cramped, her eyes burning, her mind dead. She hadn’t touched the tray Brianna had brought up sometime during the night, nor was she interested in food now.

Without looking at the finished canvas, she dropped her brushes in a jar of turpentine, then turned and tumbled fully dressed into bed.

It was nearly evening again before she woke, stiff, groggy. There’d been no dreams this time, or none she remembered, only the deep, exhausted sleep that left her feeling hulled out and light-headed.

Mechanically she stripped off her clothes, showered, dressed again, never once looking at the painting she’d been driven to start and finish within one desperate night. Instead, she picked up the untouched tray and carried it downstairs.

She saw Brianna in the hall, bidding goodbye to guests. Shannon passed without speaking, going into the kitchen to set aside the tray and pour the coffee that had been made for her hours before.

“I’ll make fresh,” Brianna offered the moment she came in.

“No, this is fine.” With something close to a smile, Shannon lifted the cup. “Really. I’m sorry, I wasted the food.”

“Doesn’t matter. Let me fix you something, Shannon. You haven’t eaten since yesterday, and you look pale.”

“I guess I could use something.” Because she couldn’t find the energy to do anything else, she went to the table and sat.

“Did you have a fight with Murphy?”

“Yes and no. I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

Brianna turned the heat on under her stew before going to the refrigerator. “I won’t press you then. Did you finish your painting?”

“Yes.” Shannon closed her eyes. But there was more to finish. “Brie, I’d like to see the letters now. I need to see them.”

“After you’ve eaten,” Brianna said, slicing bread for a sandwich. “I’ll call Maggie, if you don’t mind. We should do this together.”

“Yes.” Shannon pushed her cup aside. “We should do this together.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

It was a difficult thing to look at the three slim letters, bound together by a faded red ribbon. And it was a sentimental man, Shannon mused, who tied a woman’s letters, so few letters, in a ribbon that time would leach of color.

She didn’t ask for the brandy, but was grateful when Brianna set a snifter by her elbow. They’d gone into the family parlor, the three of them, and Gray had taken the baby down to Maggie’s.

So it was quiet.

In the lamplight, for the sun was setting toward dusk, Shannon gathered her courage and opened the first envelope.

Her mother’s handwriting hadn’t changed. She could see that right away. It had always been neat, feminine, and somehow economical.

My dearest Tommy.

Tommy, Shannon thought, staring at the single line. She’d called him Tommy when she’d written to him. And Tommy when she’d spoken of him to her daughter for the first, and the last time.

But Shannon thought of him as Tom. Tom Concannon, who’d passed to her green eyes and chestnut hair. Tom Concannon, who hadn’t been a good farmer, but a good father. A man who had turned from his vows and his wife to love another woman—and had let her go. Who had wanted to be a poet, and to make his fortune, but had died doing neither.

She read on, and had no choice but to hear her mother’s voice, and the love and kindness in it. No regrets. Shannon could find no regrets in the words that spoke of love and duty and the complexity of choices. Longing, yes, and memories, but without apology.

Always she’d ended it. Always, Amanda.

With great care, Shannon refolded the first letter. “She told me he’d written back to her. I never found any letters with her things.”

“She’d not have kept them,” Brianna murmured. “In respect for her husband. Her loyalty and her love were with him.”

“Yes.” Shannon wanted to believe that. When a man had given all of himself for more than twenty-five years, he deserved nothing less.

She opened the second letter. It began in the same way, ended in the same way as the first. But between there were hints of something more than memories of a brief and forbidden love.

“She knew she was pregnant,” Shannon managed. “When she wrote this, she knew. She’d have been frightened, even desperate. She’d had to be. But she writes so calmly, not letting him know, or even guess.”

Maggie took the letter from her when she’d folded it again. “She might have needed time to think about what she would do, what she could do. Her family—from what Rogan’s man found—they wouldn’t have stood with her.”

“No. When she told them, they insisted that she go away, then give me up and avoid the scandal. She wouldn’t.”

“She wanted you,” Brianna said.

“Yes, she wanted me.” Shannon opened the last letter. It broke her heart to read this. How could there have been joy? she wondered. No matter how much fear and anxiety she might read between the lines, there was unmistakable joy in them. More, there was a rejection of shame—of what was expected for an unwed woman pregnant with a married man’s child.

It was obvious she’d made her choice when she’d written the letter. Her family had threatened her with disinheritance, but it hadn’t mattered. She’d risked that, and everything she’d known, for a chance, and the child she carried.

“She told him she wasn’t alone.” Shannon’s voice trembled. “She lied to him. She was alone. She’d had to go north and find work because her family had cut her off from themselves and from her own money. She had nothing.”

“She had you,” Brianna corrected. “That’s what she wanted. That’s what she chose.”

“But she never asked him to come to her, or to let her come back to him. She never gave him a chance, just told him that she was pregnant and that she loved him and was going away.”

“She did give him a chance.” Maggie laid a hand on Shannon’s shoulder. “A chance to be a father to the children he already had, and to know he would have another who’d be well loved and cared for. Perhaps she took the decision out of his hands, one that would have split him in two either way he turned. I think she did it for him, and for you, and maybe even for herself.”