Free Enlightened by Joanna Chambers Page A

she had never existed. As though my heart had not been destroyed.”
    David’s heart squeezed at that painful confession. “What was her name?”
    “Mary. Mary Cunningham.”
    “I’m glad that you—that you found some happiness with her.” The words came out rather stiltedly, but they were sincerely meant, and somehow David knew Chalmers understood that.
    “And I’m glad I can speak of her to someone. For all this time, it has felt as though I’ve been denying her very existence. Denying that I loved her.” He paused. “Love should not be denied.”
    “She’d have understood,” David replied, believing it.
    Chalmers didn’t answer that right away, but at last he said quietly, “I don’t know about that. She died alone. After she took ill, I hired a nurse for her, since I couldn’t be with her all the time. It happened after I left her one evening so I could attend a dinner party Margaret had arranged.” He closed his eyes and his voice shook with regret as he continued. “She died in the early hours of the morning. I was not with her, and I should have been. I can never get that chance back again—to be there for her when she passed. I was too busy slinking back here to dine with some bore Margaret wanted me to charm.”
    The agony on Chalmers’s face was palpable. This was a soul-deep pain, far worse in its way than the physical pain the man now endured.
    “Do you still think she’d have understood, lad?” Chalmers whispered.
    David couldn’t deny that Chalmers’s confession altered his view. He found himself imagining Murdo leaving his side to perform an obligation to some hypothetical future wife and was surprised at how painful he found the mere thought. Not that he intended to find himself in such a position. He’d decided long ago that he would break off with Murdo as and when a potential wife appeared on the scene.
    “But that is not even my greatest regret,” Chalmers continued in a pained voice.
    “What is then?”
    “That I did not tell Mary I loved her till she was too ill to understand the words.”
    Chalmers’s face was twisted into an expression of self-loathing, and David’s heart ached for his friend. “I’ll wager she knew,” he whispered. But Chalmers just shook his head.
    “Words have power,” he said. “I held my confession back to punish myself for my infidelity. But when Mary lay dying, I realised I had punished her too. Saying the words was”—a shaking breath—“it was far more powerful than I realised it would be. But without Mary to hear those words, they were stillborn. Sometimes things must be said.” He closed his eyes. “And they must be heard too.”
    Chalmers sank back into his pillows, exhausted after that relatively lengthy exchange, and fell into a light, fitful slumber.
    Mrs. Jessop popped her head in again while he dozed. She carried a tea tray, which she set down on the sideboard. She poured some tea for David, dosing his cup with both milk and sugar before passing it to him. It wasn’t at all how he liked it—but he drank it down gratefully while she checked on Chalmers. There was a cup for Chalmers too, though not of tea, in his case. Mrs. Jessop sat it on the nightstand beside his bed, ready for when he woke. Then she tiptoed from the room again.
    At length, Chalmers stirred. He grimaced, almost comically, when David pointed out the draught beside his head, though he let David help him sit up straighter, the better to drink it down.
    David held the cup to Chalmers’s lips and the older man accepted most of the contents before leaning back against his pillows again.
    “So, I have a favour to ask you, David.”
    “Name it.”
    “It is to do with Elizabeth.”
    David didn’t pause. “I guessed as much.”
    Another wait while Chalmers gathered his strength again. David was coming to learn his dying friend’s rhythms, and they were heartbreakingly slow.
    “I had a letter last week from Charles Carr, my brother-in-law. He is the