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promptly burst into more tears. It was not like her to be so hysterical, but then this was developing into a very odd day indeed.
    Mercy turned away and took a swig from the decanter. She needed it now. Oh, Lord, she needed it. Some women just didn’t know a good thing when they had it.
    “I’m sorry!” Molly moaned into her borrowed handkerchief. “I don’t know why I’m being so horrid to everyone. I feel positively wretched and hate myself. I wouldn’t blame you all if you never spoke to me again.”
    What could she say? A bosom friendship of a dozen years could not be undone over a few cross words. Before she might be tempted to drink more, or accuse the other young woman of being ungrateful, she set the stopper back in the decanter. After she’d given it a good polish with the altar cloth.
    “Molly, you simply must tell Rafe about your desire to open a business. You should have shared all this with him long before now. The two of you can—”
    “It is too late. I cannot discuss it with him. I don’t want to.” She snapped her lips shut in a very stubborn line.
    “You are not being fair to Rafe.”
    Molly drew herself up like a flower unfurling, gaining strength. “You always say men are thickheaded and know nothing. A man, you said to me once, is less use and more expense in the long run than a sturdy, well-made piece of furniture.”
    Mercy laughed uneasily. “Yes, but—”
    “You said ’tis better for them if they don’t know what goes on in our thoughts most of the time.”
    “True, but I did not mean—”
    “You said we should know our own minds, be well-informed and capable of making our own decisions. Women are more logical than men, you said.”
    There was nothing she could do when confronted with her own words. She itched to pick up the wine decanter again, but somehow she restrained herself. “It is true that Rafe often lives for the moment, but that has always been the case. It is nothing new—”
    “I’m fond of him, but we’re not in love. We never were. There’s long been something in the way.” Molly shrugged, a quick, irritable motion of her slender shoulders. “A shadow of some sort between us. It’s almost as if he doesn’t see me at all when he looks at me. I used to imagine”—she exhaled a wobbly laugh—“that he had another woman on his mind.”
    “Oh?” Mercy fumbled along the shelf and began rearranging the prayer books in order of most wear and tear.
    “But everyone expected us to marry for these past few years,” Molly was saying. “It just seemed easier to float with the tide than swim against it. I daresay it was the same for him as it was for me.”
    There was a long silence. Finally, with the last, most dog-eared book placed in line, Mercy felt she’d done her best for the parson’s shelves, and now the dank stone walls of the vestry closed in again, made her nauseated. She needed the warmth of the sun. “So,” she exclaimed, “what are we going to do about this? We can’t leave him standing at the altar interminably.”
    Molly blinked away a last tear. “I…I hoped you might take the news to Rafe.”
    “Me?” Under her layers of clothing, Mercy’s skin rippled with another wave of goose bumps. “Surely his father, or his uncle—”
    “No! I can’t face them to tell them.”
    “Then, I’ll tell them, and they can—”
    “Please.” Molly grabbed her sleeve. “Please tell him yourself. It will be better coming from you.”
    “Not from you?”
    “Oh, no. I couldn’t.”
    The girl looked so pitiful in her shattered bridal garland, her nose all red and her eyes puffy, it was hard to refuse her anything. But even so… “Rafe Hartley despises every bone in my body. Why on earth would it be any better coming from me?”
    “That’s just it. Don’t you see? It would break his heart if he heard it from someone he loved. Hearing it from you, he’ll just be furious.”
    Mercy could only stare, her lips falling open.
    “I daresay