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home and wondered, and worried, and finally we just gave right up!”
    “He might’ve had his reasons,” Paul said, awkward as he stood there, uneven on his one real foot and one false one, and unsure exactly who he was defending.
    Glaring down at the paper, she said, “Oh, I’m real sure he had his reasons. There are about a million reasons to leave a woman and a little girl behind and start a new life someplace else. I guess he just picked one.”
    He said quickly, “Don’t you want to hear it?”
    “Why would I want to hear it?” She wasn’t quite shouting, but she was warming inside, like a furnace catching its coals. The heat spread up from her belly to her chest, and flushed up her throat to her cheeks. “A million reasons, goddamn him, and I don’t need to hear even one of them!”
    “Because you don’t care?”
    “Damn right, because I don’t care!” Except that she
was
shouting now, and nearly on fire with anger, or sorrow, or some other consequence of her tumultuous week. “Let him die out there, if that’s where he wanted to be all this time!”
    Paul Forks held out his hands, trying to halt her, or just defend himself—even though it wasn’t his fight, and he wasn’t the man with whom she was so furious. “Maybe he’s where he wants to be, or maybe he’s just where he ended up. Either way, he wants to see his little girl.”
    Mercy gave him a look like she’d kill him if he blinked, but he blinked anyway. And he continued: “Someday, you’ll wish you’dgone. If you don’t do it now, like as not, you’ll never get another chance—and then you really
will
spend the rest of your life wondering. When you could’ve just . . .
asked
.”
    She clenched the telegram in her fist, crumpling the paper. “It won’t be as simple as that,” she said. “If he was dying when this was sent, he’s probably dead by now.”
    He fidgeted. “You don’t know that for sure.”
    “It’d take
weeks
to make the trip. A month or more, I bet. You know as well as I do what the train lines are like these days. Everyone talks about transcontinental dirigible paths, but nobody’s making it happen. Maybe I could hop, skip, and jump it by air—but that’d take even longer than going by train. Forget it,” she said, stuffing the wad of paper into her apron pocket.
    Paul Forks stepped out of the stairwell and shook his head, “Yes ma’am. I’ll forget it. And I’m sorry, it wasn’t my place to bother you. It’s only . . .”
    “It’s only
what
?”
    “It’s only . . . when I took that hit on the field, and when they brought me here . . . I sent for my wife and my boy. Neither one of them came. All I got was a message that my boy had died of consumption six months after I went to war, and my wife went a few weeks behind him.”
    She said, “I . . . Paul. I’m real sorry.”
    He shifted uncomfortably in his clothes. “Anyway, that’s why I stayed on here. Nothing to go home to. But I don’t mean to pry. It just hurts like all get-out when you think you’re meeting your Maker, and there’s no one there to send you off.”
    With his left hand, the whole one, he touched her shoulder in a friendly way. And he left her alone there, in the stairwell with the message she couldn’t stand to read again, and no idea how she was going to answer it.
    Still pondering, she went back up to her bunk, and opened her cases to retrieve the stationery she’d taken from Captain Sally’sstash down in the hospital office. Not knowing what else to do, or what else to think about, she sat on the edge of the bed and started writing.
    Mercy’s handwriting wasn’t any good, because she’d never been schooled long enough to make it smooth, but it was legible. And it said:
     

Dear Mrs. Henry,

My name is Vinita Lynch and I am a nurse at the Robertson Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. I am very sorry to tell you that your son, Gilbert Henry, died this afternoon of February 13, 1879. He was a good soldier