Gavin kneeled beside an empty grave and blank tombstone.
“You spend more time at your sister’s grave than you do your sister,” a voice said.
He sighed. “A habit. Apologies.”
A woman kneeled beside him. “Don’t apologize. For half your life, you’d thought she’d laid here alongside our original settlement.”
He stroked his temple, pinched his eyes shut. “That night had been burned into my mind, Cassandra. The night they’d forced you into coffin and had buried you.”
“Burned so much so you didn’t believe I was alive until you dug-up my grave?”
“I had to know.”
“Well, now you do.” Cassandra swept fingers through her hair. “The whole thing was staged. I’d been sold to Corbin days before, but everyone had to believe I was dead.”
“Even your siblings.”
She peered at him and then stepped into the grave and laid face-up, hands clasped across her chest.
“What are we doing?” he said.
“‘We’ are checking out the digs, seeing what all the hoopla’s all about.” She studied earthen walls which surrounded her. “Quiet and spacious. I’ll give it that. But afterwhile, the neighbors would bore me.” Gavin chuckled.