“Antietam. September 17, 1862. You read about it, you see war movies, but this . . . I don’t know how anybody gets through it, pulls out of it if they live through it. He was in the Union advance on Bloody Lane. It was still morning, and they’d taken heavy casualties. The kid he’d made friends with—George, blacksmith’s apprentice—damn near got his head blown off. The blood was all over Billy. He was dazed, probably in shock. He knew where he was. I mean literally. He knew the Pipers, knew the land, knew the sunken road divided the farms.”

Carolee stepped to him, held out a mug of coffee.

“Thanks.” He looked down at it, but didn’t drink. Not yet. “I could hear what he was thinking. It wasn’t like reading his mind, but more like . . .”

“Being inside it?” his mother suggested.

“Yeah, I guess that’s it. He started thinking about her. Eliza. She wrote to him when she couldn’t get away that night they’d planned to elope. She managed to send the letter to his mother. He got it, and he wrote her back, but he wasn’t able to send the letter. Didn’t know, I guess, where to send it. The night before the battle, he’d written her a letter.”

“He loved her,” Clare said softly.

“He had a picture of her,” Ryder continued, “and he took it out to look at it, thinking how he’d find her when it was over, how they’d get married, he’d build her a house, they’d have kids. She’d changed him. Opened him, is how he thought of it. Anyway, it seemed like a long time in the dream, in his head that he was lying there, wearing his friend’s blood and thinking of staying alive so he could have his life with her.

“Jesus, Clare, don’t cry.”

“It’s sad, and I’m pregnant. I can’t help it.”

“Tell us the rest,” Hope demanded. Did no one else smell the honeysuckle? Did know one else realize Lizzy needed to hear the rest?

“They ordered another attempted advance. If you know anything about that phase of the battle, you know it took hours, the Confederate force hunkered down in the sunken road, the Union trying to break their line. And both sides took heavy losses.”

Damned if he’d describe it, here in this sunny kitchen with a pregnant woman silently weeping.