Disclaimer: The characters here and the world they inhabit are the creation and property of Margaret Mitchell, her heirs, and their assigns.

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The next morning, Rhett came to breakfast and saw that there was distinct animosity between the two ends of the table. Scarlett was glaring at a piece of paper in front of her, and McLure looked annoyed but not overly concerned.

"Katie, it says she's a model student."

"Because she can do a Texas Dip better than the Deb of the Year? That's our standard?" She scoffed. "At thirteen she needs to know how many pecks are in a bushel. A fancy curtsey she'll do once in her life won't help her much after there's been a war and Carpetbaggers raise the taxes."

"She's got a couple of A's on there."

"In deportment and penmanship."

"Penmanship was probably my most important skill at Tulane."

Scarlett glared, unwilling to concede the point but knowing she had to. "She got a B in English and a C in mathematics."

"What does she need those for?"

"Some day she's going to have to balance a ledger."

"You like doing that. Maybe she'll find someone who loves her enough to do those things for her."

Kate glanced along the table, noticing for the first time that Rhett was there. "A man once told me that he couldn't love me, despite the fact that I was charming and had many useless accomplishments," she said softly.

Rhett cleared his throat, annoyed with himself for having said so damned many things and with her for remembering every single one of them. "That man was a fool and most likely a liar. He should have carried you off then and there."

Ewan watched the exchange knowing that something was being said between them, and seeing the way Kate looked even angrier, but now at Butler.

"What if it was your Bonnie, Captain Butler? Would you accept such a grade report about her?"

Rhett looked Bonnie's mother in the eye and said, "I see you're hoping to get me on your side, Mrs. McLure, but you may recall that all I've ever wanted for any of my children was their happiness. Had Bonnie gotten a grade report like that, no doubt her mother and I would be having the same argument, but at the bottom of it all, the discussion would have to concern whether my daughter was happy with her grades or not. Knowing her parents, I suspect she would have had the A in mathematics and not even a C in deportment."

Scarlett's lip trembled. "If you're both going to be against me, I wash my hands of it. Ewan, you may tell her what you wish when you pick her up. I need to spend the day looking over this week's progress on the farm." She got up and walked toward the office.

Ewan drank down the remainder of his coffee and stood to go after her. "I put the ledger in the left drawer—"

The door shut. "I know where the ledger is, Ewan," said Kate.

"I wanted to get a good look at you." They'd stayed in their own rooms the night before. She seemed a little wan. "What was going on, there?"

"He—"

"You started it, was that something he once told you, that you had useless accomplishments?"

"He said it wasn't enough to make him love a girl like me. I went home to Tara not long after that, and he was right, Ewan. Nothing I learned before was enough to take care of myself or my family."

"He obviously regrets having said it."

"Not as much as I regret that it was true."

"He's not wrong about Ella, though. Do you honestly think she will learn to figure until she needs to? She's your daughter."

"I don't want her to have to face what I had to face."

"Maybe she won't have to."

Kate's lips came together in a thin line and shook her head. "Work it out with her, because if I have to talk to her about it, I'll probably pull her hair out."

Rhett asked to go with McLure to pick up Ella. He wanted the opportunity to chat with her away from the rest of the family and for her to suggest presents for the twins' upcoming birthday. He had several years' worth to make up for.

McLure went to the shops and started getting the household supplies for the week while Rhett went to the depot. It took several minutes for the train from Houston to come, but eventually it did, and several people got off while several others got on. After a few minutes the crowd thinned, and Rhett saw a young lady with a cloud of gingery hair. She was looking around until she realized who he was. Her face lit up in surprise.

"Uncle Rhett?"

She ran to hug him, but he shook his head and bent over to kiss her hand. "I was looking for my little Ella, but here I find a young lady. Miss Kennedy, it's a pleasure to see you."

"Mother is going to be some upset to see you," she said.

"I've already been to her farm and spent several days there," he replied.

"You have? I would have expected to hear her screech in Houston."

"She sent me her address herself. I wasn't entirely unexpected."

"What did she say? What happened? Did you meet everyone?"

"I met Jerry and Bud."

"You should have been here, Uncle Rhett."

"It sounds like Mr. McLure had everything handled, and I had other things to do in Charleston."

She sighed. "That's what Mother says, and Pa is really nice, but I miss Atlanta."

"Pa" again. Rhett remembered the first time he'd met Ella. Her mother had just finished nursing her in the back yard when he found them. He took Ella while Scarlett had quickly fastened herself under that blanket. Ella had nestled right up against his chest as he worked to get a bubble out of her. Scarlett had been horrified to see her spit up on his silk shirt, but he had simply wiped it off with a handkerchief.

"To tell you the truth, Ella, I miss Atlanta too. I miss having Wade and you and Bonnie and even that horrible house we lived in."

"And mother?"

"It's always a different level of adventure when your mother is around."

"Wade and I, when we first moved here, used to wish you would come get us. Mother said you had a new family now, and we couldn't stay in Atlanta because of the new baby."

"I do have a wife and father-in-law in Charleston, now, and I'm closer to my own mother and sister than I've been in a long time."

"Why did you have to divorce mother?"

He looked off in the distance. "A lot of people did some foolish things, and some evil people took advantage. I should have seen it coming and prevented it, Ella, but I had too many other things on my mind."

"Like Bonnie and Aunt Melly?" She looked sad.

He nodded. "I was very foolish, Ella."

"Has Mother shown you her patch?"

"We went yesterday and wished your sister a happy birthday."

Ella smiled a little. "I'm sure she liked that. Mother was so crazy right before she bought her land. She was so worried that she'd have the baby and no chance to plant any cotton first, but she couldn't find anything she liked. We tried to stay out of sight except for meals. Then she said she found the perfect place."

"Ella, it's very important that you and your brothers call me Uncle Rhett, do you understand?"

"You mean, no one knows that you and Mother were married?"

"Your Uncle Ewan does, of course, but your brothers are too young to understand it yet."

She sighed. "Won't it be better if everyone knows?"

"I think it will, but perhaps not quite yet. In the meantime," he said, pulling her hand within his elbow and watching her simper just the slightest bit, "I wonder if you could help me find a birthday gift or two for your brothers."

"Mother?"

Kate looked up from her ledger and looked at her second child. As usual when faced with this child, she looked for anything to call her own and failed. Instead of her sleek black hair the child had a frizzy combination of gingery-blonde shades of Frank and Suellen's hair, as though Ella was actually their child after all. Ella's eyes were greenish, but gray in most lights. They were, however, that same alluring almond shape as her mother's eyes. Kate sighed. Bonnie was almost exactly like her, but this child always seemed so different. Ella had many of her mother's facial expressions, but Kate never saw them.

"I have your grade report."

"Uncle Rhett told me. Why is he here."

"You have a C in mathematics."

"Is he going to take us back to Atlanta?"

"Your reading grade is barely a B."

"Can we go?"

"Uncle Ewan says an A in penmanship will be a good thing to have in your future, but you really need to do better at figuring, Ella."

"I can't wait to see our house again, Mother."

"What?"

"I'm so happy that we're going home, Mother."

Scarlett slammed her hand down on the ledger. "God's nightgown, Ella! Whatever gave you that idea?"

"Isn't that why Uncle Rhett is here? To bring us home?"

"Did he tell you that?"

"Well, no…"

"Why would you think that?"

"Because he's here."

"He's on a visit. He's married, Ella, and what about Uncle Ewan? What about your brothers?"

Ella thought for a minute. "Well, couldn't they all come, too?"

"And how is that supposed to work?"

"There are plenty of bedrooms in our Atlanta house, mother. Everyone will be fine."

Kate put her head on the desk. She wasn't going to try to explain why it wouldn't be fine now. "Go wash up for supper, Ella. We're not going anywhere, and you're going to learn how to figure if we have to sit in this office all day tomorrow."

Ewan followed Scarlett to her bedroom that night. She didn't want him the night before and acted like she didn't want him that night either. He didn't think she really wanted to be by herself, though. She glowered at him as she sat down and unfastened her hair. He sat down in a chair that allowed him to look her eye to eye in her vanity mirror.

"Do you want to tell me what you're thinking?"

"Not really."

"Not yet, or not ever?"

"Not—not—" She stopped moving for a moment, hands clenched. "I'll never be good enough for him."

"The fact that he hunted you down for five and a half years and came all the way out here when he found you would suggest he feels otherwise."

She turned around, throwing the last pin so hard that it and several others bounced out of the dish. "How am I supposed to believe that?"

Ewan stood and ran his fingers through her scalp and then down her neck, trying to release some of her tension. He picked up the hairbrush and started running it through her hair. "He clearly still loves you and wants you."

"Since before he started actively courting me, if you want to call it that, he's made it perfectly clear that I'm beneath him in every way. There's my Irish background, my unladylike tendencies, my childishness, the fact that I prefer to do my own business… He once said that if he was betting, he would bet on me over the Yankees, and then told me it wasn't a compliment."

Ewan watched the way her eyes glittered with the gathering of her tears. "Yet he's never been able to stay away from you."

"Whose side are you on, Counselor?"

"The truth, as always."

Kate pulled a hankie out of her drawer and dabbed her eyes. "Here's some truth for you. He was starting to think we could reconcile, right before the divorce."

"What happened?"

"Someone had some pictures of his sister, and her father got them. He had a choice between his sister and me, and he chose to help his sister."

"Do you fault him?"

"No, he doesn't care about his own reputation, but his family's reputation is too important to him. But God's nightgown! Why am I not good enough? I've never been good enough for him."

Ewan set down the hairbrush and picked her up. He sat on the chair with her in his lap. Holding her close to his chest, he observed. "Quite often, when a man says things like that, he's probably worried that the lady in question is too good for him."

"Why can't I believe that?"

Suddenly the baby started moving, hard work now that there was so little extra room in there. Ewan rubbed Kate's tummy, but kept getting caught in the gathers of her dress, so he just laid his hand over where most of the movement seemed to be. He unfastened her back with his other hand and gently pulled the dress down over her shoulders.

"What's your opinion of me, darlin'?"

She pulled away slightly and looked at him. "You're the best man I know. You work hard, and you've made something of your life. You've done hard things and dangerous things. You're educated, too. You never did poorly in figuring."

Kate's dress was far enough down to her hips that he could reach under it and caress where the baby was, now. His hand that had unfastened the dress reached around her shoulders and pulled her close again. "If I'm the best man you know, and I love you so very much, and if I respect and admire you for all of your hard work, your beauty, your native smarts, and that fire inside of you, how can you not be good enough for him?"

"You're sounding like a lawyer again."

"That's not an answer."

"He's from Charleston," Kate said, as though that should answer all questions.

"Being from Charleston doesn't make him better than anyone.

"He seems to think so. He always acted as if Charleston was the best place in the world, and as though his family was at the top of Charleston. He intended to trade on my mother's family to make Bonnie part of Charleston, too. He could never stay in Charleston before, but he always thought it was better than the rest of the world."

"The world's a lot bigger than that one little town." The baby was hiccupping, and Ewan was rubbing and patting it. "Katie darlin', I'll tell you what. I do blame him. I blame him for choosing his family, for abandoning you, for not looking to see if there was another way. I blame him for leaving you when you were at your lowest and then pushing you still lower with that divorce. I blame him for ever marrying you if he couldn't accept you as you are. It doesn't matter what he thinks, you know. What does being worthy of him even mean? Why should you care?"

"Maybe it's not even him so much as all the time I spent with him. I was married to him for five years, you know, and at the end he acted as though I never deserved happiness. Was it such a waste of my time?"

"You've been married to me for five years now, too, and you've given me plenty of happiness. I hope you've been happy, too?"

The tie of Kate's chemise came undone, almost as if by accident, unless it had something to do with the twinkle in Ewan's eye. The shoulder of the garment slipped from her shoulder, and Ewan spent several minutes enjoying the view.

"If I may put it on the record, Katie, he acted completely without honor. His sister was in a tight spot, but he made vows to you. He took an oath. Did he even ask his sister about it? Did he look for any other way to solve his problem?"

"I don't know. He never claimed to be a gentleman. He always claimed not to be one." Scarlett stretched a little. The chemise once again sat properly on her shoulders, but the loosened neckline now gaped deliciously. Ewan was going to need to put his lips in a few choice places soon, but he wanted to finish the conversation.

"I can't tell you why he made the choices he did, and I can't tell you why he spent half your life trying to convince you that you're less than you are. I know he wishes a lot of those things back now that he's made his choices. He wants you back, darlin'. I've seen his eyes watching you. He wants you, he wants the twins, and he wishes this baby was his, too."

Kate looked into his eyes. "How would you feel if it was Marie? What if Marie somehow was alive and came to find you?"

"That would be a complicated legal situation." She didn't care about the legal situation, and he didn't have a good answer for what she really asked. "I couldn't say for sure, but I don't think I could love her now. The war changed me, losing her changed me, and my time with the Rangers changed me too. She wouldn't know me now and I wouldn't know her."

"And I've had all this time away from Rhett. For five years I've been Katie. Rhett doesn't even know me anymore."

"No, he doesn't. I wouldn't mind knowing you a little better."

Kate slid her hands up his shirt. "Would you?"

His hand that had been on her back slid up her neck to tip her head toward him while his other hand started caressing her neck and shoulders.

The next week took on a pattern in which Rhett and Scarlett went over to the patch in the mornings to spend a half hour or hour remembering their daughter. They returned in the mid-morning and Rhett played with the boys while Scarlett looked over her business plans. After dinner, Rhett would go out with the boys and men and help with such tasks as they could on the farm and horse ranch.

Together Rhett and Scarlett looked at some financial documents to compare notes on how the investments he'd settled upon her were doing. Rhett looked everything over and saw that she'd managed it quite well, but wondered if he should liquidate some hidden assets. He made a note to himself that he would have a lengthy discussion with his attorney that Charles Bell didn't know about. Scarlett still had one or two affairs being handled by Henry Hamilton. She expected Wade to take them over after he completed his law degree.

In the evenings and mornings, Rhett watched Scarlett's bedroom door carefully. He noticed that although Scarlett and McLure had separate bedrooms, McLure usually came out of Scarlett's room in the morning, regardless of which room he went into the night before. There was one morning that a blushing and smiling Scarlett came out of McLure's room, wearing what was obviously his robe over her nightgown.

He tried not to let it matter to him. It never worked. The first time he realized she had been married during the war, he thought for fifteen minutes about how to get rid of her husband before realizing that he'd been told she was widowed in the same sentence. He spent two years wishing for Frank's death and even trying to plot it until it finally happened.

Now Scarlet was married to someone worthy of her, and he couldn't decide if it was better or worse for him. She certainly enjoyed this marriage more than she had with Charles or Frank, maybe more than him. Rhett had promised her fun, but he'd never quite managed it. As soon as he had the ring on her finger, he had expected her complete allegiance and love without giving either to her. Now she did all of the things that happy wives did, but with McLure. Rhett finally knew what a happy marriage to Scarlett would have been like, because he saw her enjoy it with someone else.

The boys' birthday was a successful event. They enjoyed the gifts they received from the entire family, and "Uncle Rhett" made a lasting impression upon them. No one could compete with their Pa, but Rhett seemed to be someone they liked. He watched Scarlett, doing what he realized she so often did, gathering wrappings to set aside while he and the children made merry. She stayed on the perimeter of the room and let him have the floor, figuratively and literally.

McLure looped his arm around her at one point and pulled her onto the sofa. Rhett watched the other man pull his wife's head to his shoulder and whisper into her hair, stealing kisses as he did. Scarlett nodded and tipped her head up to smile at him. Ella, home for this weekend as well, looked at them with stars in her eyes. Rhett looked at the people in the room and realized it would be time for him to leave, soon.

He didn't want to be there when the baby came, and the bluebonnets were starting to fade. He said his good byes to the children. Ella wasn't happy, but what she wanted simply could not be. He told her if she studied well and made her mother proud, he would get her as special gift. He watched her eyes light up and thought that she was so very much like her mother. He went for one last interview in Scarlett's office.

"I guess it's time for me to go, Scarlett."

"I hope you have safe travel."

"It's a straightforward trip now I know where I'm going."

She shifted in her seat. "Is your father-in-law so horrible?"

"He's pretty ruthless."

"Are we-what would he do about-" She looked out the window and back at him. "I don't want them coming after my children."

"Relax. The way you have things set up, I would have to sue you, and I have no intention of doing that."

"They got you to divorce me."

"That's the only thing they have. I don't share a bed with my wife, and I don't hesitate to humiliate her when I can. I'm certainly not telling either of them where to find you or our children."

"I appreciate that."

She stood up and came around the desk to hug him. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. He turned his head to capture her lips, but just for a moment. "I love you," he whispered.

"I care for you," she replied.

It was better than fondness.

It wasn't until he was on a train somewhere around the Louisiana border that he remembered her eyes. He'd seen two things there, two things she'd rejected when he'd offered them to her: kindness and pity.

A/N: This is a bit of a filler chapter, so the Dave Brubeck quartet seems the best option here. "Take Five" was from an album with odd time signatures in all the songs and was written in 5/4 time. Al Jarreau's cover is one of my favorites, if you prefer it with words.

Thank you so much to all the readers and reviewers, including WhitmanFrostFiend, Romabeachgirl1981, GWTWRSB, gabyhyatt, kanga85, COCO B, Guest 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6 & 7 & 8 & 9, Conlyn70, Truckee Gal, samandfreddie, Another Guest, Asline Nicole, gumper, breakfastattiffanygs, pro patria mori, Aunt Pitty, heresvivi, and Aethelfraed. I knew this storyline would be controversial, and you haven't disappointed me even if it's to say that I've disappointed you. I appreciate all of your thoughts and ideas. You're the best!

Please take the time to read and review some of the other GWTW fics here at FFN. I'd love to encourage other authors to write faster, too! I'm dying to know several things, like whether Rhett will contest the divorce or how Scarlett will use her latest realization, to mention two other stories.