Afterward, Tomas and Nancy ask us to join them for breakfast before we leave. The children feed Storm, who is doing an excellent impression of a fur rug, sprawled on the snow, refusing to move. Apparently, she’s getting breakfast in bed, and I have no doubt she’ll rouse enough to eat it. I wouldn’t mind an hour of sleep myself before the long walk home, but I can also rouse myself to eat, and I know Tomas and Nancy want to talk to us.
We’re barely settled into the small alone-hut when Tomas says, “I would like to ask for transportation down south. For my family.”
“What?” Nancy says, startling enough that she nearly drops her breakfast bowl.
Tomas doesn’t look at her. “We’ll go to Whitehorse. I should still have money in an old account. It’ll be enough to get us started. I’ll set up Nancy and the kids someplace outside the city, where they’ll be more comfortable, and I’ll rent an apartment and find work in Whitehorse.”
“Did I miss our discussion on this?” Nancy says. “Because I’m quite certain I’d have remembered it.”
Tomas folds his hands in his lap. “I should have done this twelve years ago. Taken you away instead of marrying you and tying you down with—”
“With our children?” Her voice rises. “If I have ever—ever—given the impression that I consider our children anything but blessings—”
“I don’t mean it like that,” he says quickly. “I just … I made a mistake, and I want to fix it now.” He looks at her. “I want to set you free.”
“Set me free? Or be rid of me?”
Dalton says, “Maybe Casey and I should wait out—”
Nancy doesn’t seem to hear him. “I made a mistake. Not a mistake in what happened with Ellen. Maybe I should say that was wrong, but it was something I needed. The mistake was not telling you that I needed it and working out a solution together. If you want to leave, then I understand, but as for setting me free?” She meets his gaze. “You never held me captive. I could have left anytime I wanted. I didn’t want to.”
I slide toward the exit, Dalton following, but Nancy stops us.
“Yes, we apologize for making you bear witness to a very personal conversation,” she says, “but I have a feeling if you aren’t here, this won’t be resolved. You are our passage south. We need to decide this before you go.”
That isn’t true. We’ll be back. But I understand what she’s saying. They’ve avoided this conversation for over a decade, and if we’re awaiting an answer, they can’t push it aside again.
“Do you want this?” Nancy asks Tomas. “If you do, then yes, we’ll go south and start over in separate lives sharing our children. Because that last part is the most important. I’d never give them up, and I’d never ask you to. They are ours, whether we are together or not. But if you’re offering me a way out of this marriage, the answer is no. I don’t want that. If you’re saying I can stay on the condition this never happens again…”
She meets his gaze. “I cannot promise you that. I have no idea if it will or won’t, and that is a very long conversation we need to have if we want to make this work. But I would like to make it work. You are my partner. You are my friend. You are my lover. Nothing has changed for me. With Ellen, I was answering
a question about myself that I should have answered twelve years ago. And I don’t know if I did. I found something I needed, but it didn’t change what I already have, and I’m not sure what to make of that. I need time to work it through, if you can give me that.”
Tomas nods. That’s all he does. Wordlessly nods, his eyes glistening.
“You want me to stay?” she says.
Another nod, and a quiet, “Please.”
“Then the question is ‘do we stay.’ And the answer…” She exhales. “The answer is no. Not here. Not after all this. It will be too hard for the children, and really, that’s just the excuse I think we needed to go. We’ll remain for the winter and then we’ll decide our next step.”
And now, in the midst of tragedy, I need to ask them a question unrelated to any of this. I kick myself for not doing it earlier, but it isn’t as if I’d forgotten the reason we were here: to find Abby’s parents.
Earlier, it’d been clear that Nancy didn’t realize Ellen had been trading goods to help Abby’s mother, so I didn’t see a lead there. Also, I’d suspected one of them might have murdered Ellen, so I hadn’t been about to expose Abby’s existence. Now, though, with Ellen’s death unrelated to Abby, there’s no reason not to ask.
I ask with extreme care, hoping I won’t seem too callous.
Sorry your nephew murdered your friend and lover, but while I’m here, maybe you could help with this other case?
It helps, of course, that the “other case” is a lost baby. It’s hard to begrudge help with that. They are both horrified and relieved. Horrified that Lane almost accidentally killed an infant … and relieved that the child is safely in Rockton.
“We had no idea,” Nancy says. “It makes sense, now that you’ve told us. Yes, she’d have wanted those scraps for diapers and the balm for breastfeeding. There were other items, too, and they all fit. She was helping a woman who’d borne a winter baby.”
“As she would,” Tomas says softly.
Nancy’s eyes glitter with tears. “Yes, she would. Absolutely. I only wish she’d told us, if only so we could help you get that baby back to her mother. She must be going mad with worry. When we find Lane, he may be able to tell us what Ellen was doing or where she was coming from when he … when he…”
She breaks off, her voice catching. Tomas reaches for her, hesitating a little, but she falls into his arms. We slip out after that, followed by Tomas’s promise that they’ll help us in any way they can. In return, we promise that we’ll be back in a week or so, to see whether they need help finding Lane. Then we’re gone.