She couldn’t help herself. Not when he was so utterly distraught. She stood and moved to him, wrapping her arms around him.
“Leland,” she said. “You are my brother. My big brother. You have been my everything. When I took a ridiculous interest in telegraphs, you encouraged me. You sent me a book about encoding all the way from Hong Kong so I could learn more.” Her voice shook. “When we were younger, you listened to me. I could always count on you. When I felt I had no choice but to marry a second time, you found me a solution and you broke the shell of my world wide open. Don’t you dare apologize to me for something you didn’t do, do you understand?”
His eyes were glossy. “But, Amelia.”
“You and I,” she said, “we were always in it together. We will be in it together as long as you allow it. I thought…” She choked on her fears. “I thought you’d decided that I wasn’t really your sister, not anymore now that you’d realized that I had another mother. A living one who wanted me.”
“No.” He brought up his hands, tentatively, touching her elbows. “No. I just knew that what I had done. It was not forgivable. I couldn’t ask for that. I can’t let myself want it.”
Amelia nodded. “When my Chinese mother left, she told me she would be back.”
He nodded.
“And she told me to hold on to my heart.”
He exhaled.
“I could not have done it alone,” she told him. “I could not have done it without you there with me every step of the way. If what happened to me didn’t crush me, it was because you were there holding me up.”
“Amelia.” He shook his head.
“And you are the only person in the world who can help me with my conundrum. I have a stack of letters from our mother. One every day or so. They keep coming and coming. I’ve read a handful—I can show you them. She acts as if nothing has happened, and I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to forgive her.”
Leland let out a pained noise. “Forgive her? Has she even acknowledged she did anything wrong?”
“Should it matter? Should it matter what she’s acknowledged? Should I hold my resentment against her, when she raised me? When she expended effort and care and…and everything that she did?”
“Amelia.” Leland pushed her away, but only so he could search her expression. He shook his head. “After I left, after I realized what I had done, I got drunk for three days and vomited out the contents of my soul. Have you any sense that she’s harbored a tenth that much remorse?”
“No, but…” This was why she needed to talk to Leland. He would understand what she owed and help her measure out her feelings. “Leland. She took me in.”
“Amelia.” His voice was softer, gentler. “Amelia. What she did to you was not ‘taking you in.’ That is not what you do with a child who is wanted by her parents. The word for what she did is abduction. The word for what she did when she kept you from your language is theft. The word for what she is doing by pretending that nothing is wrong—by making you feel that you are at fault for not forgiving her without explanation—is shite.”
Amelia exhaled. “When I was talking to my Chinese mother, we talked about my feeling as if I didn’t belong. As if I didn’t fit.”
He nodded.
“She told me that I was a bridge. That I fit perfectly in the space where I was. And if I’m a bridge, don’t I owe it to someone?” She felt desperate. “To something, to try to bridge?”
Leland sighed. “You can’t be a bridge to someone who tries to steal the ground from beneath your feet. You will break your heart trying to find steady footing, and it will never come.”
Amelia’s heart twisted. It was painful, so painful, the realization that came to her with those words. It hurt every part of her to understand what her brother was saying. But she could not make one person into a different one. She could not alter the course of another person’s mind. Accepting that she could not solve this was hard.
“I thought the same thing for a while,” Leland told her. “That I could bridge. The reason I quit being a missionary?”
“Yes?”
“I haven’t told you all of it.” He looked away. “I’m afraid to tell you all of it, but…”
“Leland. You must know I’ll love you anyway.”
He let out another breath. “I don’t want to marry a woman. Ever.”
“How could I blame you for that? I’ve been married before. It wasn’t exactly good.” Although she’d started to think…but no. Never mind Grayson.
“I’m not sure you understand,” her brother said, blowing out a breath. “I’m in love with a man.”
She turned to look at him.
“He tells me it’s normal—mostly normal anyway. Understood in some places, if not all. And there I was, a missionary, working for an organization that was telling people that it’s wrong.” He looked at her. “It wasn’t just the hypocrisy of the thing. When I finally realized I was allowed to believe myself normal, I couldn’t stay any longer. I tried for a little while, tried to talk to people about bridging the gap between local beliefs and ours, but you can’t build a bridge on ground that wants to shake you loose. Trust me, Amelia. I’ve tried.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, to the emotion in his voice or the way his eyes avoided hers. Instead, she reached out and took his hand. “I won’t shake you loose. If you say it’s normal for you, then it’s normal. I promise.”
For a long while, they sat there, hand in hand, not speaking as the light changed. Amelia’s thoughts turned round and round.
“Will I ever meet the man you’re in love with?” she asked.
“You’d want to?”
She nodded. The silence stretched a while longer. Leland wasn’t her brother, not by blood, not by appearance. He was her brother by history. By love. By choice. And that thought that she had a choice meant…
Amelia let out a long exhalation. “I believe I mentioned I have a stack of letters from her.” She didn’t say who she meant beyond the single pronoun.
He knew anyway. “Do you want me to read them through with you?”
She’d read some of them already, enough to know that the apology and the understanding she needed to see was never going to come. She could choose to let the ground shake beneath her feet, or…
Instead, Amelia shook her head. “Would you help me burn them?”
He squeezed her hands. “Of course,” he said. “Of course I will.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The morning that Grayson connected the Asian and American continents via electric current dawned clear. Clear enough that as the sun rose over the waters of the Pacific, he could finally make out snow-capped, blue-gray mountains made insignificant by distance, dancing on the horizon.
He turned to Lao. “Signal the Celerity. It’s time.”
A few crew members gathered on deck, celebrating the sight of their destination.
“Have the Celerity lay the shore cable and meet us at the rendezvous,” Grayson said.