He Ignored My Pain, So I Left Him in Regret novel · Chapter 28 of 32
Chapter 28: What She Carries
I let Maud walk up the shelf ahead of me.
She was seventy-one, and she had walked three days in the snow behind the wagons, and she climbed the slope on her own with her hand on her knee.
Joss stayed at the road again.
Rafe was still sitting by the cairn.
He heard her coming and looked up, and I watched his face go still.
"Grandmother," he said.
Maud did not answer him.
She did not look at him, and I do not think she could.
She went straight past him to the cairn and stood in front of it for a long time with the snow settling on her shawl.
Then her knees gave, and she went down on them.
"It's a small one," she said.
Her voice was nothing like the voice that had signed my name away.
"It was three months," I said.
"I know how long it was. The keeper told the whole Hall."
"You knew somebody would bleed," I said.
"I knew."
"Why me?"
"Because you'd stand it," Maud said. "Your father said so. You never complained, even as a girl."
I felt the old tight heat come up in my chest.
"I never complained because nobody ever asked me how I was."
She turned her sharp black eyes on me, wet now.
"I'd do it again, Ivy," she said. "I want you to hear that from me, before you hear it from someone else. I lost my son to a lung fever and I swore I wouldn't lose his boy."
"Maud."
"And I hate that I would. I've sat on the road for three nights and hated it."
I looked at her, small and kneeling and terrible.
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