Epilogue #2
“I need to tell her the truth,” she said.
“All of it—my name, where I came from, why I let her believe I was someone else for so long. She deserves to hear it from me plainly, Henry, not pieced together from whatever she overheard last night, frightened and half-understanding in the dark.” She met his eyes, searching them for any hesitation and finding none.
“I don’t want there to be a single secret left standing between any of us. Not anymore.”
Henry was quiet a moment, then nodded slowly, his hand coming up to cover hers where it still rested against his chest. “I agree,” he said.
“She’s stronger than we give her credit for, and she loves you enough to hear it honestly.
Better she learns the whole of it gently, from you, than carries around some half-formed fear about what it means. ”
He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “When they get back this afternoon, take her for that walk you two are so fond of. I’ll see to supper myself, give you both the time you need.”
Ruth nodded, grateful, and let herself lean into him a moment longer, breathing in the familiar scent of hay and horse and him, steadying herself for the conversation still to come.
Though, for the first time in longer than she could remember, she did not feel afraid of the truth at all.
Only ready, finally, to set it down plainly and let it be believed.
***
Later that same day, Ruth found Lola, having returned from town, out by the paddock fence when she went looking for her, perched on the lowest rail with her chin propped on her folded arms, watching her pony graze in the afternoon sun.
“Would you walk with me?” Ruth asked.
Lola nodded, and they set off together along the fence line, the child’s small hand finding Ruth’s without needing to be asked, the way it had so many times before. Though today, Ruth thought, it meant something different. Today, there was no lie standing quietly behind the gesture.
“I want to tell you something,” Ruth said, once they’d walked a little ways in comfortable silence, the tall grass swaying golden around them. “About my name. About who I really am.”
Lola looked up at her, solemn in the particular way only children manage, as though she already sensed the weight of what was coming.
“My name is Ruth,” she said. “Ruth Turner. Not Nora. I met a woman named Nora on the train that brought me here.”
“So she let you borrow it?” Lola asked, a crease forming between her dark brows. “But why?”
“Because I was running away from someone very scary. From someone who wanted to hurt me. So when I met Nora, she was kind to me and she gave me her name so that I could start a new life with it, because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Who was chasing you?” Lola asked, working through it slowly.
“A bad man,” Ruth said. “But you don’t need to worry. He’s gone now and he’s not coming back.”
Lola remained silent and after a moment, Ruth crouched down on her knees, so she was closer to the child’s height.
“I know it was wrong of me to let everyone believe I was Nora. I was very frightened, and I made a choice I shouldn’t have made, and it hurt your Uncle Henry very badly when he found out.
I’m sorry it hurt you too, even if you didn’t understand why at the time. ”
Lola considered this with the gravity of a six-year-old turning over something far too large for her years. “But you still baked pie with me,” she said finally. “And you still tucked me in at night and braided my hair. And we are the same because you don’t have a mama and I don’t have one, either.”
“Every bit of that was real,” Ruth said, her throat tightening. “The name was borrowed, sweetheart, but nothing else about me was. Not the way I love you. Not one single moment we’ve spent together.”
Lola was quiet a moment longer, plucking at a piece of long grass beside the fence post. Then, she looked up with the sudden, uncomplicated clarity children sometimes managed better than grown men and women ever could.
“Can I still call you Nora sometimes?” she asked. “Just sometimes. Because that’s the name I learned first, and I like it.”
Ruth laughed, startled, and felt the last of the tension she’d been carrying since the jailhouse finally ease fully out of her chest. “You may call me whatever you like,” she said, pulling the child into a tight embrace.
“Ruth or Nora, it makes no difference to me, so long as you keep calling me yours.”
“You’re going to marry Uncle Henry for real,” Lola said, muffled against Ruth’s shoulder, not quite a question.
“I am.”
“Good.” Lola pulled back just enough to look up at her, entirely satisfied with this arrangement. “Then you’ll really be my mother. Not pretend. Real.”
Ruth’s eyes filled again, though this time the tears came easily, without any weight of grief behind them at all. “Real,” she agreed softly, brushing a strand of hair back from the little girl’s face. “I would like that more than anything in this world.”
They sat together a while longer on the fence rail, watching the pony graze in the golden afternoon light.
For the first time since she had climbed out a window in the dark of Devil’s Hollow, Ruth felt entirely, completely at peace with exactly who she was.
No borrowed name left standing between her and the family she had, against every fear that had once driven her, finally managed to find.
***
The following Sunday morning arrived bright and clear, the kind of gentle, golden light that seemed to bless the whole ranch at once.
Sunlight spilled warm across the kitchen floor, dust motes drifting lazily through the open window, the sweet smell of biscuits baking mingling with coffee and the faint scent of lavender soap that had, somewhere along the way, become simply the smell of home.
Ruth stood before the small mirror in her room, fastening the last button of her best dress.
It was pale blue, simple, the same one she’d worn that first Sunday she’d walked trembling into Pastor Luke’s church, though it felt now like a lifetime had passed since then, rather than mere weeks.
Today, she would walk back through those same doors not as a frightened woman hiding behind another’s name, but as herself.
Fully, honestly, without a single lie left standing between her and the people she loved.
She smoothed the fabric at her waist and allowed herself a small, private smile at her reflection. It still startled her sometimes, catching sight of her own face and finding it settled, at peace, instead of drawn tight with the exhaustion of a secret carried too long.
A soft knock came at her door, and Lola’s voice followed it, bright with excitement, “Ruth! Uncle James says we have to leave soon or we’ll be late, and Uncle Henry’s acting strange!”