“It is fine, Dallin,” she murmured, her gaze sliding back to the window, and she watched blankly as Kinley led her brother’s mount over, stringing it to the team, concentrating on that to keep from thinking of Val and how very much she loved him and would miss him.

Dallin rested a hand on hers, forcing her eyes back to his.

“It is not fine, Myrtle,” he said gently but firmly. “You are a special young woman. One who survived these past days without so much as a maid to help you. You deserve more than being forgotten by your family.” He drew his hand back. “It is my hope you can forgive us.”

And in that moment, through the blinding grief of the end of her time with Val, came a sense of triumph. She’d earned their family’s respect. Oddly, that didn’t quite fill her the way it ought. The way it would have before this. “There is nothing to forgive,” she said softly. And there wasn’t. Their failure to remember her had been the reason she’d had these days alone with Val, and they would forever be the happiest, most wondrous moments of her entire life.

Of their own volition, her fingers moved, and she drew the curtain back a fraction so that she might see him, so that she could catch one more glimpse.

But he was gone.

The life slipped from her fingers, and she dropped that fabric; it fluttered forlornly back into place.

Myrtle drew in a slow, uneven breath.

The windowpane revealed her brother’s intense scrutiny on her, and she reluctantly looked at him once more.

“Myrtle, I know—” And then he abruptly stopped. Shock filled his features, and he glanced from Myrtle to the window, and then back again to her. “Why do I think your upset is . . . not with our negligence?”

She sank her teeth into her lower lip and shook her head.

“Is that because you’re denying it or, rather, you don’t wish to talk about it?”

The latter. It was decidedly the latter.

Her brother proved relentless. “You care about him.”

Yes, she cared about Val, but it was so much more than that.

She loved Val.

“Myrtle?” he urged.

“There is nothing to say, Dallin,” she said, her voice threadbare as, with her eyes, she begged him to let the matter rest. “We . . . were together. He helped me.” And she proceeded to share with him all that had transpired since their family carriages had pulled away and she’d been left alone. She shared about Val’s wife and the reason for his reclusiveness. When she finished, Myrtle shrugged. “As you can see, it was merely a sense of responsibility that brought him after me.”

Dallin sat with the silence for a long while. “Myrtle, I saw the way that man looked at you, and he looked like a man possessed when he saw you.”