Kid almost believed Ruth was a mirage or the remnants of a beautiful dream, but if she was, she would have been looking at him instead of at the deputy, who'd been charged with night duty. "Is it too early to talk to the prisoner?"
Kid scoffed. That's how she referred to him now: "the prisoner". He half preferred she call him Stephen again.
"Go right ahead," the deputy said.
"Hello, stranger," he said. He was hoping to point how ridiculous it was to say they didn't know each other.
"Please, I don't want to argue or discuss us."
"But I do. What does a name matter? If you told me your name was really Caroline Svensson, I'd still love you."
"It's more than that, and you know it. You're not a Christian, you go around shooting people as part of your trade, you didn't care whether we were married or not, you lied to me repeatedly. Need I go on?"
"No, I say you've about covered it. And of course, you're perfect."
She sighed loudly enough that the whole town could have heard her. "I didn't say that."
"You can lay out whatever excuses you want, but you knew the important things about me. I didn't shove myself on you. And more than that, I still love you. If you walk away from what we have, it'll be on your conscience." He'd asked it once before, but she had never satisfactorily answered it. "Do you love me?"
She stared at him, looking him straight in the eyes. Didn't she feel the invisible cord of love and passion that tied them together. "I love you as a sister concerned for your soul."
She couldn't have given a more terrible answer. A simple no would have sufficed. "You needn't worry over my soul, ma'am."
He could see the polite term stiffened her. Good. It should feel unnatural when lovers retreated behind social constructs with one another.
She took a seat on one of the wooden stools put out for visitors and opened her Bible and read, "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me. What you heard was God calling you. It didn't have anything to do with me. Don't shut Him out because of our problems."
"Let me just stop you right there. Do you think I'm a stranger to religion? My father read to me from that book every evening."
"But did you listen?"
"I listened, and I watched as he took his anger out on my mother and any of his children who happened to be handy at the time. I don't know where the love of Jesus was, but it wasn't in him. It wasn't at our house. So I stopped believing."
"Oh, Kid," she said so tenderly he knew his story had affected her, but he didn't want her sympathy. He only wanted her love, and she'd made it abundantly clear that she couldn't give it.
"I thought I'd found it in you, but I was wrong."
"But that's what I'm trying to tell you. You can have His love and experience it in you."
The sheriff had told him about the incident where she'd prayed for a woman and she'd been healed, but he believed the woman had just convinced herself she wasn't sick anymore. He wouldn't fall for her powers of persuasion, powerful though they might be. He'd made a mistake in mentioning that he didn't know God but had been at the threshold. "I don't need you to save my soul, Sister Ruth." He added the sister part bitingly. "So why don't you take yourself and your faith healing hogwash and peddle it to someone who gives a hoot."
She'd reached the end of her rope he could see because she lifted up her hands in frustration. "I don't know why I bothered."
"I don't know why you bothered either. I would be a gentleman and be the one to leave, but my current location makes that kind of impossible."
He didn't have to ask twice. The sound of the slammed door should have been satisfying, but it wasn't. He realized she had only been trying to be kind and compassionate in her own way, but he'd become another project to her like Ralph and Scarlet and that hurt more than if she'd just left him alone.