She didn’t ask for the brandy, but was grateful when Brianna set a snifter by her elbow. They’d gone into the family parlor, the three of them, and Gray had taken the baby down to Maggie’s.

So it was quiet.

In the lamplight, for the sun was setting toward dusk, Shannon gathered her courage and opened the first envelope.

Her mother’s handwriting hadn’t changed. She could see that right away. It had always been neat, feminine, and somehow economical.

My dearest Tommy.

Tommy, Shannon thought, staring at the single line. She’d called him Tommy when she’d written to him. And Tommy when she’d spoken of him to her daughter for the first, and the last time.

But Shannon thought of him as Tom. Tom Concannon, who’d passed to her green eyes and chestnut hair. Tom Concannon, who hadn’t been a good farmer, but a good father. A man who had turned from his vows and his wife to love another woman—and had let her go. Who had wanted to be a poet, and to make his fortune, but had died doing neither.

She read on, and had no choice but to hear her mother’s voice, and the love and kindness in it. No regrets. Shannon could find no regrets in the words that spoke of love and duty and the complexity of choices. Longing, yes, and memories, but without apology.

Always she’d ended it. Always, Amanda.

With great care, Shannon refolded the first letter. “She told me he’d written back to her. I never found any letters with her things.”

“She’d not have kept them,” Brianna murmured. “In respect for her husband. Her loyalty and her love were with him.”

“Yes.” Shannon wanted to believe that. When a man had given all of himself for more than twenty-five years, he deserved nothing less.

She opened the second letter. It began in the same way, ended in the same way as the first. But between there were hints of something more than memories of a brief and forbidden love.

“She knew she was pregnant,” Shannon managed. “When she wrote this, she knew. She’d have been frightened, even desperate. She’d had to be. But she writes so calmly, not letting him know, or even guess.”

Maggie took the letter from her when she’d folded it again. “She might have needed time to think about what she would do, what she could do. Her family—from what Rogan’s man found—they wouldn’t have stood with her.”

“No. When she told them, they insisted that she go away, then give me up and avoid the scandal. She wouldn’t.”

“She wanted you,” Brianna said.

“Yes, she wanted me.” Shannon opened the last letter. It broke her heart to read this. How could there have been joy? she wondered. No matter how much fear and anxiety she might read between the lines, there was unmistakable joy in them. More, there was a rejection of shame—of what was expected for an unwed woman pregnant with a married man’s child.