Chapter Fifteen
Ethan’s jaw ached. Only then did he realize that he’d been clenching his teeth together for at least the last several minutes.
He sighed and tried to breathe more deeply and relax his jaw, but it was hard to let the tension seep away when he remembered the way Derek had walked past smelling like a distillery that morning, flush-faced and laughing with Zachariah and Luke.
He was going to be just like Pa someday, drunk out of his mind before ten in the morning while letting his children run wild all over town.
Fabric rustled, his sister moving from inside the wagon. “You should be nicer to Grace,” she said to him as her head popped out from under the canvas.
“Do we have to talk about Grace?” Ethan asked. He was already frustrated with Derek. Did he really need to worry about Grace Hawthorne, too?
“Yes, we do.”
Ethan didn’t turn around to look at Hannah, but he could easily imagine the expression on her face. She would be scrunching up her nose and pursing her lips, usually while crossing her arms for emphasis.
“Why?”
“Because you upset her.”
Ethan sighed. “Do you think I haven’t noticed? I feel like I constantly upset her simply by existing!”
“You do not upset her by just existing. You upset her by being you.”
At that, he did look at Hannah—just a quick, fleeting glance over his shoulder. She looked at him with the exact expression he’d anticipated, crossed arms and all.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do,” Ethan said.
“You could be a little nicer.”
“I am nice.”
Hannah snorted. “You’re nice for you, but I don’t think you realize that sometimes you come across quite coldly. Maybe try being a little more open with her. Explain yourself a little more.”
“I wasn’t aware I was on trial.”
“Now you’re being a child,” Hannah said. “When she mentioned her books to you, what did you say to her?”
“That I’m not interested in reading because I have more pressing matters to attend to.”
“You could have said something more tactful than that.”
Ethan scowled. He turned back to face the road, which was steep and uneven. The holes and loose rocks spelled disaster for the horses and oxen if they weren’t careful, and the wagon train moved at a snail’s pace.
“I’m not going to tell her I can’t read, and I’ll be furious if you do,” Ethan said.
Grace would think less of him, he knew it, and Ethan just couldn’t endure that. Not when they seemed to be close to finding some sort of common ground.
“Why? A lot of people can’t read.”
“It doesn’t matter why.”
Ethan refused to admit that he didn’t really know why. Sure, he wanted Grace’s approval, maybe even her respect, but Ethan also knew there was no rational reason for why he ought to want either of those things.
Hannah sighed. “Fine. Don’t tell her. But it’s not about you not reading. It’s about the way you brushed her off. You made her feel like you were being dismissive, picking at her for enjoying something.”
“Well, what do you want me to say?” Ethan asked. “I’m so sorry for not wanting to read, Your Highness?”
“For a man who doesn’t read, you certainly sound like a character in a melodrama.”
“Hilarious.”
“Just…” Hannah trailed off. “I don’t know. Try to soften the way you say things? Explain a bit when you can, if you want to try to improve things with Grace.”
“I don’t owe her an explanation.”
“It’s not about owing her anything,” Hannah huffed, crossing her arms. “It’s really quite something, though. The two of you are so similar—”
Ethan was nothing like Grace, who was beautiful and charming and well-bred. She was too good for a man like him, too good to even be compared to him. He could just imagine her pretty face twisted into an offended look at the thought.
“We are not.”
Hannah laughed. “You most certainly are! You both assume the other thinks the worst of you, and you’re both so reluctant to just talk to one another.”
Crash!
The sound of wood splintering and horses neighing split the air. Ahead of Ethan, all the wagons jerked to a halt without warning. He pulled on the reins hard to try and stop their own wagon. The horses whinnied shrilly in protest, one threatening to buck. Ethan’s pulse jumped.
The animals stilled and came to a stop. They hadn’t crashed.
“Hannah, are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Hannah said, her hand trembling as she straightened her bonnet. She looked a little shaken, her face pale and her hair askew, but she was unharmed. Ethan imagined that she’d been tossed around a little, but he’d been too busy with the horses to notice.
Ahead, a few men and women were climbing down from their wagons to investigate what had happened. It couldn’t be anything good, not from the sounds Ethan had heard.
“Stay with the horses,” Ethan told her. “I’ll see what happened.”
Horses, smart as they were, could tell when people were afraid or upset, and that would, in turn, make them upset. Thankfully, Hannah had always had a way with soothing animals, so Ethan trusted her to keep them calm while he was gone.
He jumped down from the wagon and hurried forward, taking care over the rough road.
One of the wagons up ahead was pitched over at an angle; only the nearby rockface had kept it from flipping entirely.
A wagon wheel was broken in half, a large piece of it wedged into a massive hole, and two men were working to free the panicked horses.
A lump formed in Ethan’s throat. He recognized those horses and the wagon.
Derek.
Cold filled Ethan. His first thought was that Derek might be badly hurt or even, God forbid…
dead. Ethan would have to tell Hannah, and if anything had happened to Derek, his sister’s heart would be broken.
Guilt pierced his heart like thorns. There was no reason at all for him to feel guilty, but he did.
It was guilt for never responding to all of Derek’s cheerful greetings and efforts to be real brothers.
He should’ve done better. He should’ve been better.
Amos approached Ethan and put a hand on his shoulder, jerking his head to the right. “He’s over there.”
The earlier cold was swept away by white-hot rage as soon as Ethan saw that Derek was indeed alive. There he was, standing a few feet away and drinking from a canteen. If it wasn’t water in that canteen, Ethan was going to throttle that man. He shouldn’t have even been driving a wagon.
Ethan clenched his hands into fists as he stormed over to Derek, whose easy expression fell just a little.
“It was an accident,” Derek said before Ethan could start berating him. “It could have happened to anyone.”
“Anyone who was drunk!” Ethan snapped. “What were you thinking? No, don’t answer that. You weren’t thinking, of course. You never do. That’s the problem!”
“I didn’t drink that much,” Derek said. “And that was hours ago!”
“That doesn’t make the situation better,” Ethan growled. “Instead, it suggests that, even sober, you aren’t capable—”
“Would it kill you to express an ounce of relief that I’m not injured?” Derek cut in, hurt shining in his eyes.
The gall of him! Even after crashing a wagon, Derek insisted that he was the victim, the one who ought to have Ethan’s sympathy. As if wanton carelessness deserved sympathy!
“Why would I? You’re not my brother!” Ethan snapped. “And you never will be.”
Derek’s face reddened in anger. “Whether you like it or not, we have the same father. I am, in fact, your brother.”
“Half-brother,” Ethan spat. “At best. But that doesn’t mean we’re family. I didn’t even want you to come on the trail with us, and this is precisely why!”
“You have the most remarkable talent for acknowledging everyone’s mistakes except your own,” Derek said, crossing his arms. “Let’s be honest with one another just this once. You don’t care about the wagon at all.”
Ethan barked out a disbelieving laugh. “You really think I don’t care?”
“I do. You don’t care about anything except being able to blame me for yet another thing that’s gone wrong,” Derek said. “You would burn every wagon in this train if you could somehow blame me for it!”
“That’s not true!” Ethan scoffed.
The words struck hard, though. Derek exaggerated, but Ethan did have a tendency to blame Derek for a lot of things. Some were his fault…but not all of them.
“It is!” Derek snapped. “You want to blame me for what our pa did, along with everything else bad that’s ever happened to you.”
“No, I want to blame you for being so reckless!” Ethan exclaimed. “Because you are!”
“No, you want to hate me because I didn’t suffer like you!” Derek retorted. “I had Pa, and you didn’t. And that just eats at you, doesn’t it? But Pa ain’t here, so you’re bound and determined to blame me for everything!”
Ethan inhaled sharply, but he couldn’t seem to get any air into his lungs suddenly.
“That isn’t true.”
“It is.”
Derek stormed away, heading back to his damaged wagon.
Distantly, there was a part of Ethan that wanted to follow Derek, to yell and shake and fight him for yet again trying to blame someone else for his mistakes.
That was always what Derek did. Why confront his own shortcomings when he could cast the blame on someone else?
And yet…
Ethan fixed his gaze straight ahead, trying to ignore the stares of the rest of the camp. Some of them, like Doctor Holloway, had reason to be there. But some of them, like Zachariah and Thomas, were just gawking.
Maybe a little of what Derek had said was true. Maybe Ethan’s pa—maybe their father—walking out of his life had hurt him more than he wanted to admit. Ethan roughly ran a hand through his hair, fighting the impulse to swear, because his ma had always told him that respectable men didn’t curse.
Something rustled faintly behind him, and a flare of irritation shot through him. If it was someone else coming to view the disaster that had unfolded—
When he turned, he saw Grace standing apart from the other women, closer to him than the others. Ethan closed his eyes and took a steadying breath. He was pleased to see her, but, with a rush of embarrassment, he wished she hadn’t seen him yell at his brother.
“Grace.”
“Ethan.”
His eyes snapped open. Grace stared at him for a long moment before her face softened with sympathy.
“I don’t want your pity if you’re about to offer it.
” Ethan paused. Despite the frustration boiling inside him, he remembered his earlier conversation with Hannah.
“I don’t mean for that to sound unkind. It’s just that I hate that kind of looks.
That’s the way everyone looked at me when they pitied me as a child. ”
“I see.”
“How much did you hear?”
Grace sighed deeply. “Enough,” she said. “I would have walked away, but I didn’t want you to notice me. Truthfully, I considered staying hidden and not letting you know that I’d heard at all, but that felt dishonest somehow.”
Ethan nodded. “I’m glad.”
Grace drifted closer to him. For a long time, they just stood beside one another and watched as the damaged wagon wheel was pried loose and another put on.
“When I was a boy, Pa left us,” Ethan said at last. “He’d been having an affair with a woman named Elizabeth. They had a child—Derek—and Pa decided that he wanted to be with them.”
“That must have been unfathomably hard.”
“It was. I remember resenting him for that,” Ethan said, “but being angry was easy, in a way. It was harder for Ma. She was never the same after that. There were some days when she couldn’t even get out of bed, no matter how much Hannah and I needed her. And Hannah was inconsolable.”
“I can imagine,” Grace murmured.
“She used to cry all the time,” Ethan continued. “She wanted to know why our pa had left us, and I just didn’t have an answer for her. I felt like I had to be her brother and her father all at once because she had no one else.”
“I’m so sorry, Ethan. You clearly did your best for her, though.”
“Still…” He sighed. “Hannah should’ve had a happy childhood. She should’ve had a ma and pa who loved her, but all she ended up with was me.”
“And what about you?” Grace said gently. “You should have had a ma and pa who loved you and took care of you as well.”
Ethan nodded, hesitating before continuing, “I should have. Derek is—he’s right, in a way. I don’t blame him for Pa leaving us, but it’s hard not to be…”
“Jealous?”
“Something like that. When I look at him, I think of how that could’ve been me. I could’ve had a normal childhood. I might’ve grown up to be a cheerful young man without a care in the world, and with every opportunity in front of me.”
“And instead, you feel like you have to be in control of everything,” Grace said, stating her opinion plainly.
Ethan stared at her, unsure where she’d gotten that idea, but he found himself unable to argue with what she’d said. She was right, and far more observant than he’d realized.
“You worry that if you aren’t in control all the time, something terrible will happen. Sometimes you don’t even know what that terrible thing is—just that it will occur if you aren’t completely vigilant.”
Sometimes, I feel as though I’m drowning beneath the weight of it all,” Ethan confessed. “It isn’t even logical to feel that way. It’s all in the past, and I can’t do anything about it.”
“Sometimes, feelings just aren’t logical,” Grace pointed out.
“Well, they should be.”
Grace laughed loudly at that. The sound of her mirth calmed Ethan’s anger just a little.
He cast a sideways glance at her, noting that her eyes crinkled a little when she laughed, and a warm rush colored her cheeks the hue of roses.
She was a pretty woman, but she was even lovelier when she laughed.
I can’t believe you aren’t married yet.
Ethan looked away before he could say something ridiculous and ruin the moment between them. It wasn’t any of his business why she hadn’t married. It wasn’t as if she’d marry him. Not that he’d ask her, of course! He had no time for such considerations, as it was.
“Well,” Grace said, noticing that the men had managed to get the wagon upright again. “I suppose we’ll be moving soon. I should get back to our wagon.”
“I suppose so. I’ll see you the next time we stop.”
“Of course.”
But Ethan didn’t leave right away. Instead, he stood there thinking about Derek and Grace.
He’d felt regret at the thought of Derek being hurt, and maybe, just maybe, that had something to do with what Grace had said about Ethan’s need to control everything around him.
Derek was the very picture of unpredictability.
Was it any wonder Ethan found himself so frustrated with the young man?
Ethan sighed and trudged back to his own wagon, where Hannah was waiting.
At least he’d be able to reassure her that Derek was fine.
His sister wouldn’t be asked to endure yet another heartbreak.
Ethan would force himself to think about only that and bury the rest of his thoughts about Derek deep inside himself.
The one silver lining to Derek being such a careless fool was that he probably wouldn’t want to revisit their conversation any time soon.
Maybe they could even pretend it hadn’t happened.