A/N: Brief mention of suicidal thoughts in this chapter and vague allusions to them in the next two chapters.


Chapter 26 – September 1916 – Forgive me, Pa

The earth was trembling. She was back there again - watching, begging, time suspended against a canvas of horror.

"No. No, I don't understand. This is gone. This was gone."

Abigail was shaking her head violently, still staring at the page as though she just needed to clear her vision, that it would surely be something different the next time she blinked. The ink betrayed her every time. The first time I held your hand was at the dinner table… the first time I held your hand… just say the word.

"I burned this!" Her voice was rising now, nearing hysterics. "How did you get this?"

The room was spinning. How many years? How many years had she spent being unwittingly humiliated? How much I would ache for it. She clutched her stomach, sickness swimming inside of her.

"You've been making a fool out of me for… what, Henry? Months? Years?" she pleaded. "All while I was thinking… while I thought we were…" She clenched her teeth hard, dangerously close to tears. "My goodness, you must have found it all so very amusing."

The blood had drained from him, his whole body growing slacker with resignation.

"If you think I've ever been amused by any of this, you're profoundly mistaken."

"All the ways you tried to ruin me after the accident, why wouldn't you hold this over me too?" she spat back.

Henry ran a rough hand over his face. "Sit down, Abigail."

"Tell me how you got this," she insisted again.

"Abigail." His hands were grabbing hers now, making the breath rush out of her. "Please sit down so I can get through this."

She let him guide her to the armchair, and he settled on the coffee table in front of her. She wanted to pull her palms from his but found that she couldn't now. His grip was simultaneously trigger and anchor as she waited, watching him open his mouth again and only manage shuddered breaths and hesitations. It was he who dropped her hands, thinking abruptly better of touching her.

She felt it come over them like a cloud – the deep sadness that had always overshadowed everything about them. Every inch of him was agony. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

"Henry," she called him back firmly, her whole body ready to burst into flames. "Henry, please."

Slowly, he nodded, taking one more calming breath.

"Noah was worried. He had told me… told me about the ventilation. The company had written back ignoring the concerns. You saw that today." Abigail nodded, urging him on. "We wanted to get them to listen, we were trying to figure out how. Noah was doing checks while we made a plan… workarounds for the equipment. He did them every day. I asked him…"

He paused, hanging his head toward his clasped hands.

"I asked him to keep quiet. Not to worry anyone else, though he admitted to me he had told Peter. He'd ask Peter to check sometimes if he couldn't, but otherwise it was him. It all fell to Noah. Except… that morning…"


May 1910

Henry had seen his superintendent storming up to the small mining office that morning, assuming the furious urgency he could see in Noah's movements was caused by his being late. Henry came out from behind the desk ready to chastise him, but the moment the door swung open, Noah grabbed him by the coat and tossed him across the room, crashing him into a wall.

Henry snapped up, his face burning.

"Stanton, what the hell?!" he growled.

Before Henry could regain his balance Noah had charged forward again, smashing a burly fist into his cheekbone. Henry was scrambling up, spitting with rage, when he heard the words Noah was shouting over him in the cramped space.

"My wife? My fucking wife?"

Henry slowed, his eyes hard as he got his back straight against the wall. Noah was red and fuming, staying back now but ready to come for him again any second. Guarded, Henry straightened his coat.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Noah's large hand slammed a piece of paper onto the desk, the metal rattling underneath the blow.

"I went to leave her a note this morning and I found this. Want to explain that to me, you son of a bitch?"

He kept direct eye contact with Noah, careful arrogance intact as he slid his hand across the desk to retrieve the paper. Turning his attention down, he saw that erratic cursive writing filled every line of the page in front of him. Dear Henry…, he read.

"Yeah," Noah sneered. "Tell me that's nothing."

"It is nothing," Henry said, roughly folding the letter back up and tossing it to the desk. "I don't know what you've got here, but you know your wife better than I do. Could be made up for all I know. She's been reading that romance novel your boy got her, maybe she's writing her own," he said, waving a hand in dismissal.

"Is that how you want to do this, Gowen? Stand there and insult me, on top of everything else, like I'm a fucking idiot?" Noah boomed. "That's probably what you've thought this whole time, isn't it? The two of you, having a real good laugh behind my back. But I knew. I did, I knew."

"You don't know anything," Henry spat.

The denial fell on deaf ears, Noah's eyes narrow and accusing.

"The auction. The flowers. You did it right in front of me, you – " The vulgar words were swallowed as Noah lunged forward, swinging at him again. Henry dodged the blow this time, then pulled up and cracked his own fist into Noah's jaw, stopping the siege.

Noah's hand flew up to cover the darkening bruise. He turned slowly back to Henry, eyes wide and watering with shock.

"Oh my God," he whispered.

Henry hung back, winded and wary. Noah was shuffling heavily in front of the desk, at a loss for what to do now. "I felt her pulling away but I didn't believe it," he was saying. "She was always asking…"

Collapsing into a chair, Noah turned his desperate eyes up to Henry.

"Gowen. Gowen, please."

Henry pursed his lips and mustered his confidence up again, leaning forward on the desk. "Stanton, listen to me. I am not going to entertain this. You're already late and we've got to deal with the Company's response on that vent fan. That letter, okay? Not whatever this is," he said, waving the paper at Noah before shoving it into his pocket. "And I need this morning's – "

Noah's eyes flickered. Where there had been pleading now ran deep with fear.

"Stanton?" Henry pressed. A sudden dread bubbled in his chest, reaching up to ring faintly in his ears. "Stanton, it's almost 7:30, did you check on the fan? Stanton!" he shouted when there was no response, his hands clapping the desk in panic.

Noah surged to life, knocking the chair over and running out toward the mine. Henry was out of the office right behind him, headed for the alarm.

"Everybody get out!"

Noah had disappeared inside the shaft, his voice booming out against the walls. "Now, now, now!" he shouted. "Pe-"

And then… ringing.

The explosion swallowed everything. Henry was knocked backward before he could even sound the alarm. He called out for rescue crews, that much he was sure of. And then he was running. Everywhere. Anywhere.

ooo


The flames licked up beside them in the dark dead house. She didn't move for a long time.

He couldn't articulate the thoughts, but he knew the pain… had known some version of it for years. Its shadow would appear any time there was sun, its footsteps creaking any time there was quiet. The darkness he had summoned laid bitter and heavy on his tongue. It would follow her now as it had followed him. Irreversible and inescapable.

"All this time," she whispered through a trembling hand. "All this time it was my fault."

"No, Abigail, no. You didn't do anything. I never wanted you to think that. That's why – "

The urgency in his voice meant nothing, the words traveling past her. She began to shake, rocking her body back and forth.

"No, no, you kept this from me because I killed them. You didn't want me to know. You were protecting me from discovering that I am the reason my son is dead. I'm the reason everyone's son is dead."

"It was an accident, Abigail," he pleaded with her. "It was the company, forcing us to make do with patchwork, to gamble men's lives. There were thousands of ways it could have gone wrong!"

"But it wasn't those ways, was it? It was that day, and that letter, and my husband. It was my sin." She was pacing now, tears flowing wild down her cheeks. "I always thought it was true. I always knew, deep down, that their deaths were my punishment."

"Abigail, stop, you cannot blame yourself for this." He repeated the words even as he knew their pointlessness.

"No?" she wheeled on him. "How about for my husband dying thinking that I didn't love him? Or for being so wicked and terrible to even think those things, never mind write them down? My child was suffocating. My husband was being buried alive, spending his last moments asking for forgiveness. And there I was, foolishly, selfishly, sitting in the home that they gave me, thinking that I was the one who couldn't breathe!"

The finger that jabbed, accusing, into her chest fell away as her arms gave out. Self-loathing bled from her powerless frame.

"What about that, Henry? Can I blame myself for that?"

He reached for her as he would an injured animal, but she wanted none of his pity. None of his warmth. She jerked away from him now, the man she had pressed herself against only an hour before.

"No," she said, bitterness biting the word. "No."

She grabbed the letter from the table, and threw it into the fire before he could stop her.

"Abigail!"

"No, Henry. It's gone. All of that is dead. Just like them."

Without another word, she swept down the stairs, the slam of the door echoing behind.

ooo

She wouldn't kill herself. She wanted to. With every agonizing unworthy step, she wanted to. Memory and shame spiraled together, dragging her down to feel every second of Noah and Peter's final moments. But though God may have already damned her, she wouldn't allow her selfishness to hurt another child so reprehensibly.

"Cody. Cody, wake up."