He closed his eyes and fought the battle against his flesh for an agonizing moment. He needed to hold and console her as much as he needed to breathe. Without hesitating any longer, he brought his hands to her waist, lifted her into his arms, and wrapped her close just as he’d done that night in steerage.

She came willingly, pressing her face into his chest. Her arms slid around him, and her fingers clung to his back, digging in as if she were drowning and he was her only hope.

“What’s wrong with me, Joseph?” Her voice was ragged. “I don’t want the ring. I don’t want to remember Sarah. I don’t want to keep her memory alive.”

He stroked the length of her braid. “Maybe it’s easier to forget.” Was that what he’d been doing? Trying to forget about his family? He’d shoved and kicked his pain aside for years too. How could he offer advice to Mercy when he’d been running from his grief for so long that he’d nearly lost himself in the process?

“If you ignore your pain, you can go on,” he whispered. “But it’s still there, buried deep.”

“I don’t want to think on it. I can’t.” She sucked in a trembling breath.

He wanted to soothe her, to tell her she didn’t have to remember, that it was all right to forget. Yet he sensed what the forgetting had already cost her, for she too had lost some of herself.

“Maybe unearthing the sorrow allows it to finally surface and then dissipate.” He didn’t know. Perhaps the sorrow would always be keen. Even so, if they never brought it up, he suspected the grief would only fester and hurt them all the more.

“I don’t want to unearth my own grief,” he admitted, “but maybe we can help each other to do so.”

She pulled back and studied his face. “Will you tell me of your grief, Joseph? The pain you feel deep down?”

He hesitated. Could he really do it? Could he dig up the past and lay it bare? To Mercy?

She lifted a hand to his face and gently cupped his cheek as he’d seen her do oft to Sarah. “I’d bear your pain if I could.”

His chest swelled with need—the need to know her, body and soul, the need to have and to hold her. “You already bear the sorrows of too many,” he said quietly. “I would take yours instead.”

While comforting her, she’d ended up almost sitting in his lap, her face mere inches from his, her lips so near, beckoning him.

A warning clanged within him like the ship’s bell.