He Offered to Pay Her to Leave His Son… Then His Son Made a Choice He Never Saw Coming

Leave my son and I’ll see this home through the next three winters. Jonas Merrick said it the way a man states the price of grain flat already settled, not open for negotiation. Mabel Quinn stood on the porch of the children’s home, a basket of mending forgotten at her feet. He had ridden into the yard only minutes before, dismounted without hurry, and tied his horse to the rail like a man who had come to discuss nothing more than weather.

Behind her through the open door, the younger children were arguing over whose turn it was to say grace. Mr. Merik, I don’t. You’re a good girl, Miss Quinn. His voice stayed even. I want that understood before I say the rest. He glanced once toward the buildings beyond town, though his ranch lay too far north to see from there.

There are men on that place with wives and children of their own. When cattle sell badly, it isn’t only my pocket that feels it. Wages get thin. Stores wait to be paid. Elias knows that. Mabel kept one hand on the porch railing. I’ve arranged a marriage that would make some of that easier. Land joined to land. Credit we would not have to ask twice for.

Jonas climbed one step and placed an envelope on the railing between them. This home has done more with less than most people in this town know. If you leave Elias, I’ll guarantee its support through the next three winters. Flower, fuel, whatever it needs within reason, and there is enough there for you to begin somewhere else.

Mabel looked at the envelope. I don’t want money for myself. Then don’t take it for yourself. Jonas tipped his head toward the open doorway. Give it to them. Inside, one of the younger boys broke his biscuit in two and pushed the larger half toward the girl beside him. Mabel’s eyes dropped to the envelope again. She still did not touch it. Jonas waited.

Leave before Elias gives up something he cannot get back. Hoofbeats came hard up the yard road. Jonas turned. Elias was already swinging down before his horse had fully stopped. “What exactly?” he said. “Are you asking her to choose?” Jonas didn’t step back. He turned to face his son the way he might face a buyer trying to talk down a fair price.

I’m asking her to think past this week. Something you don’t seem inclined to do. I heard what you offered her. Elias’s eyes went once to the envelope, then back to his father. Money for the home. Money for her to leave. That isn’t asking. That’s buying. Call it what you like. Jonas’s voice didn’t rise. The home needs it whether you approve of how it’s offered.

Mabel’s hand tightened on the rail. It isn’t as simple as either of you are making it, she said, quiet enough that both men turned to her. He isn’t wrong about the ranch. I’ve seen the hands come through town on a bad week. I know what thin wages look like. Something in Elias’s face went still.

Not anger at her, more the look of a man realizing the ground under him wasn’t as solid as he’d believed an hour ago. Jonas saw it, too. He didn’t press further. He picked his hat back up off the rail, touched the brim toward Mabel, civil as ever. “Think on it,” he said, and went down the steps to his horse.

Neither of them spoke again until the hoof beats had faded past the gate. Mabel picked up the envelope, didn’t open it, just turned it once in her hands. “That money could keep this place warm through winters we might not otherwise manage.” Elias didn’t answer right away. He looked past her at the porch post patched twice already at the cracked window pane still sealed with paper and paste instead of new glass.

“If there’d been no envelope on that rail just now,” he said finally, “would you still be telling me to leave?” Mabel looked at him a long moment. “No,” he nodded once. The way a man sets down a tool he no longer needs. Then we’re not deciding anything here. He held out his hand. Come with me. Where? Home. Mine. I want this said once in front of him where he can’t ride off in the middle of it.

Mabel looked back at the porch at the children now crowding the doorway to see who was leaving. Then she climbed up beside him, and the wagon rolled north toward the one house in the county that had never once let her through its front door. Neither spoke for the first smile. The road climbed slow out of town, and Elias kept the horse at an even pace, the kind a man keeps when he doesn’t trust his hands to do anything faster.

Mabel broke at first. You don’t have to do this. I know. He didn’t look at her. I’m doing it anyway. She twisted the edge of her shawl in her lap. I don’t have anything saved, Elias. Not really. Whatever’s left after my board, I send half of it out to the home most months. I always have.

That was the first he’d heard it said so plainly, though he’d suspected as much a long while. The same dress worn three winters running, the same boots resold twice rather than replaced. “So if you walk away from what your father’s offering,” she went on, “we’re not walking into much of anything. Not from my side.” Elias was quiet a moment.

I’ve got what I’ve saved. It’s not nothing. It’s not the ranch either. No. No bitterness in it. It isn’t. She looked down at her hands. I keep thinking about what he said about the winters. If he really means to see the home through them. If he means what he’s always said about that home, he’ll see it through whether you stay or go.

Elias’s jaw stayed set on the road ahead. That’s not a bargain he gets to make with you. Mabel didn’t answer that. I’m not asking you to be sure of me, Elias said after a while. Quieter now. I’m asking you to let me be sure of you a little while longer. Until you can be sure yourself. Mabel didn’t say anything else the rest of the way.

She only watched the road unwind ahead of them and did not look back toward town. The ranch house came into view long before the wagon reached it. White clabbered against the hillside, a barn behind it large enough to hold four of the building Mabel had just left. Cattle scattered across pasture that ran to the treeine and passed it.

Hired hands crossing the yard didn’t look up as the wagon passed. Wagons came and went here all day. Mabel had seen the house from town before at a distance the way she’d seen the courthouse or the bank, a thing that belonged to other people’s lives. She had never once come up the drive. She understood, watching it grow larger, exactly how much a man could lose by choosing her instead.

Eleanor Merik met them at the door before Elias had tied off the team. She said nothing about whatever had already reached her, only touched her son’s arm once briefly, and looked at Mabel with an expression Mabel couldn’t yet read. Inside, Peter stood near the window, arms crossed, saying nothing.

Jonas came down the stairs already knowing why they’d come. “Sit,” he said. Nobody sat. He walked once to the mantle where a photograph stood himself, younger, gaunt, beside a woman who might have been Eleanor 20 years back in a dress mended more than once. “Your mother and I didn’t marry for love,” he said. “We married because it made sense.

Two ranches joined were stronger than two ranches alone.” He looked at Elellanor. I didn’t love her the day we married. I love her now more than anything living. Eleanor’s eyes stayed on the floor. Not shame, closer to a woman hearing a story about herself that was true and not the whole truth at once. Beatatrice is a good woman, Jonas went on.

She’d bring credit this ranch needs and never once complain about the work. Given time, the rest follows. It did for us. Elias didn’t answer right away. When he did, he kept it short. I understand what the ranch needs. A B I don’t deny what I owe it. Another I won’t marry Beatatrice. Even knowing what it may cost you. Yes. Something colder moved into Jonas’s voice.

Then understand what it costs beyond you. Whatever I told her this morning stands only so long as you don’t force my hand. marry her instead of doing right by this family and that home loses every dollar of it starting this winter. Mabel’s breath caught sharp enough that Peter looked over at her. Elias didn’t. He kept his eyes on his father.

The Mets’s yours to answer for, not mine. Mabel stepped half a step forward. You don’t have to do this because of me. Elias looked at her, then at his father, and said nothing to either of them. He crossed to the small writing desk near the window where a ring of keys sat beside the ledger he’d kept every season since he was 19.

He sat both down side by side and stepped back. Jonas looked at the keys a long moment. When he spoke again, the calm was gone from his voice for the first time. Then you’re finished here. Not manager, not heir. Walk out that door with her and as far as this house is concerned, you’ll have no more claim on the Merrick name than any man I pay by the weak.

He stepped closer, close enough that Mabel felt Elias go still beside her. You think whatever you’ve managed to save will carry you through one bad winter? You’ll be standing at this door again inside 2 years asking for what you’re throwing away today. I’m telling you now, so you can’t say I didn’t. That door will not open. Not for you.

Not for her. I won’t ask for it back. Something in Jonas’s face tightened at that. Not softened. Tightened the way a man’s does when a wound lands somewhere he hadn’t braced for it. Peter followed him out to the yard. You’re really going looks that way. Peter looked at the house behind them, then at his brother. Damn.

Nothing more needed saying between them. Eleanor came out last. She took Elias’s hand in both of hers and for a moment held it the way she might have when he was small. “Come see me when you can,” she said. Jonas heard it from the doorway. He didn’t stop her. Elias helped Mabel up onto the wagon seat.

He didn’t look back at the house as they pulled out. Not until they’d nearly reached the end of the drive, when he turned once quick and faced forward again. Mabel saw it. She said nothing. The children’s home found Elias a place in the loft above the tool shed. A cot and a lamp and little else. Mabel went back to the room she’d slept in since she was seven.

One of the boys caught him crossing the yard that evening. You staying here now? Just tonight. The boy considered that. So you don’t have a house either. Elias looked toward the dark line of hills north of town, where one stood lit and warm that was no longer his to walk into. “Not tonight,” he said, and kept walking. In the morning he sat with Mabel at the kitchen table, with his savings counted out in stacks and a sheet of figures between them.

He was used to numbers with more room in them, a ranch that could absorb a bad month without anyone feeling it. Mabel went through his list with a pencil, crossing out nothing, only adding lines he hadn’t thought to add. “You’ve priced the land, the stock, the repairs,” she said. “You haven’t priced the winter.” “We’ll manage the winter.

” “With what? Once the rest of this is spent.” He didn’t answer that. He looked at the number again and then at her, and understood she wasn’t arguing with him. She was doing what she’d always done with a ledger, making sure the page told the truth before anyone signed anything. They looked at three places that week.

The first was cheap, and Elias saw why within an hour. The well ran low by August most years, and the grass showed it thin and gray green even now. The second had a fine house and a price to match, more than the two of them could carry without borrowing against a future that wasn’t guaranteed yet.

The third looked worse than either from the road. The barn roof sagged on one corner. The fence leaned in three places he could see without getting down from the wagon. But the well ran deep and steady, and the pasture, though grazed hard, still had grass coming up green where it had been rested.

“Even with that barn?” Mabel asked. Elias looked at the water trough, still full, though no one had tended it in months. “Bn can be fixed?” He bought it 2 days later. Peter rode out to the children’s home before the sale had even closed, worried more than curious, and found his brother mending a strap on the porch.

He left an hour later, knowing there would be a wedding as soon as the deed was signed, and rode straight home to say so. Eleanor told her husband he ought to go. Jonas said nothing to that, which was its own kind of answer. On the morning of the wedding, Eleanor put on her good dress and told Jonas only that she and Peter were going into town. Not a question.

Not quite a defiance either, just a fact laid on the table the way Elias had once laid down his keys. Jonas didn’t stop her. The church was small, the pews mostly empty on both sides, but not on Mabel’s. The matron sat near the front with two of the older children, and beside them, the woman who worked the other counter at the general store.

Eleanor and Peter came in just before the doors closed, and Mabel, catching sight of them from where she stood, missed a breath in the vow she was reciting, before she found it again. Afterward, outside on the church steps, Eleanor came to her before she came to her own son. She didn’t say much, only took both of Mabel’s hands in hers for a moment, the way she might have if there had been a mother of Mabel’s own standing there instead.

Be well, she said, and let go before either of them could make more of it than that. Peter helped load the wagon after, hauling the one trunk and the few crates of belongings up with more energy than the job required. Mostly, Mabel suspected, because it gave him something to do with his hands.

“Try not to let the roof fall in on you before Christmas,” he told his brother. “I’ll do my best.” Mabel looked once toward the far end of the street, where the children’s home sat behind its low fence. a life she’d known every day of it until this one. Then she climbed up beside Elias. No one saw the wagon that stopped some distance off, past the cottonwoods along the road, or the man who sat in it without climbing down.

When the church bell rang, the wagon turned and went back the way it came. By evening, Elias and Mabel stood together in the yard of the small ranch that was now theirs. The roof still sagging at one corner, the fence still leaning, the barn still needing more than either of them could give it in a single day.

“Fence first?” Elias asked. Mabel looked up at the roof. “Tomorrow.” They went inside. Cattle were selling low that month, low enough that Elias rode home from town, already counting how many more head the money in hand could buy. “Eight,” he said, laying it out on the table that night. Maybe 10 if the price holds.

Mabel didn’t answer right away. She pulled her own sheet toward her. Feed through winter. The reserve they’d agreed not to touch. What was left over if the well needed work before spring? Five, she said. Five leaves half that money sitting idle. Five leaves us a winter we can get through without selling anything back at a loss. He didn’t like it.

He said so plainly. and the next morning walked her out to the north pasture instead of arguing further. Showed her how far the grass ran, how it had come back since the property changed hands. What land like this could carry through a season if a man read it right. Mabel listened. Then she laid her own numbers against his, the way she once laid figures against a customer’s memory at the store counter.

Not to win, only so both of them were looking at the same page. They bought five. By the second week, she caught him counting the empty stalls more than once, the way a man counts money he didn’t spend. He never said he regretted the number. He also never brought home more than the five. One of the five turned out steady enough to milk, and within the month, Mabel had traded a morning’s mending at the store for a handful of laying hens off a customer thinning her flock.

None of it amounted to much on its own. a little milk, a few eggs, butter when there was cream to spare. But it was money that came every week instead of once a season, and it meant less had to come out of the reserve for things they could grow or gather themselves. The barn roof came next, and there wasn’t enough of anything to fix all of it at once.

Elias wanted the section over the feed first. Lose the barn’s protection there, and they’d lose the winter stores with it. Mabel argued the east fence, where two rails had already given way, and the ground beyond it belonged to a neighbor who wouldn’t take kindly to wandering stock.

They walked both, argued little, and settled it by cost, and by which failure would cost more if it came first. The worst of the roof got patched. The fence got braced, the porch waited. That one wasn’t only a matter of priority. Elias had already ordered lumber for it before the roof and fence were even settled. ordered the way he’d have ordered for the Merrick place, more than they needed, on credit he assumed would hold the way it always had.

Mabel found the invoice before the wagon carrying it had left town, and added the sum twice to be sure she wasn’t wrong. They sent back what they could and ate the loss on the rest. Elias didn’t argue about it. He’d spent years buying for a ranch that could absorb a mistake like that without feeling it. This one couldn’t. They hired no one full-time.

A man came for two days when the well needed a hand stronger than either of theirs, and went home paid and not asked back. The rest they did themselves, slower than either would have liked, faster than either had feared. Peter came out most weeks, sometimes with news, sometimes with nothing but a spare hour, and a willingness to hold a fence post steady.

Elias asked after the ranch nearly every time, the same handful of questions in some order or another. How’s the north place? Busier, father, working more? Peter never said much beyond that, and Elias never pushed him to. Once he came with a small roll of bills, he sat on the table without ceremony. I don’t take money from him, Elias said. It’s not his.

Peter didn’t sit down. It’s mine. Take it or don’t, but it’s not his to have anything to do with. Elias took half. Mabel began setting an extra plate on Thursdays whether Peter had said he was coming or not. He usually was. Two of the older boys from the children’s home wrote out in September asking if there was work. Elias found it for them.

Fence, stalls, the garden, hauling water, and paid them fairly at the end of each week for the work they’d actually done. The matron told him it wasn’t necessary. He kept writing it in the ledger anyway. One of the boys, paid for the first time in his life, counted the coins twice before he’d believed they were his to keep.

Neither of them spoke often about the threat Jonas had made that day in the parlor, but neither forgot it either. As far as they knew, the home’s steadiest support had ended the day Elias walked out with Mabel beside him, and they tried to fill as much of that gap as they could. What they couldn’t spare in cash, they sent in milk, eggs, garden vegetables, firewood when there was firewood to spare.

Mabel still worked 3 days a week at the store. The wages there were the only steady thing they had until the ranch could stand on its own. By the time the first hard frost came, the fence held. The barn didn’t leak where it mattered. The small herd was fat enough going into winter, and the ledger, while thin, wasn’t red. Elias stood in the yard one evening longer than he needed to looking at all of it without any particular satisfaction on his face, just looking.

The way a man checks a fence he built to see if it’s still standing. “You coming in?” Mabel called from the door. He looked a moment longer. Then he went in. They kept bringing what they could to the children’s home, even through weeks when what they could spare wasn’t much. flour, lamp oil, a sack of dried beans once when the garden hadn’t yielded what they’d hoped.

The matron watched the wagon pull in one October afternoon, watched Elias climb down in a coat patched twice at the elbow, and finally said what she’d clearly been holding back for some time. “You don’t need to bring so much.” “We manage fine,” Mabel said. The matron looked at the wagon a moment longer, at the thin load in the back, at the horse that wasn’t young, at the coat again, and something in her face gave way before she meant it to.

You don’t need to replace what Mr. Merrick. She stopped herself too late. Mabel went very still. Replace what? The matron closed her eyes briefly, the way a woman does when she’s already said more than she can take back. He never stopped, she said. Not once. The week after everything happened, he came to see me himself.

Told me the amount would stay exactly as it was, no more, no less, and that I wasn’t to say whose it was. Elias set down the sack he was carrying. Since the beginning. Since the beginning. Why? The matron looked at him with something close to pity. He said the children had no part in it. She looked between the two of them a moment longer.

And I’ll not have you two starving yourselves for a debt that was never real, believing him cruer than he is. That’s the other half of why I’m telling you now. She made them both give their word, not to use it, not to carry it back to him as a weapon, not to let it reopen anything that had only just gone quiet.

Mabel gave hers without hesitating. Elias took a moment longer, but he gave it too. He said almost nothing on the ride home. Mabel didn’t press him for it. It was Peter out the following week mending fence alongside his brother who filled in the rest without meaning to. “How’s the ranch?” Elias asked, “The way he’d started asking most weeks now.

Cattle sale, credit, whether the bank had been civil lately.” Peter kept his eyes on the wire. Fine, Peter. His brother let out a breath. Not fine. The Prescotss pulled their business clean out after after everything. Cost us the credit arrangement we’d had for years and a hauling contract besides. Father’s carrying more of it himself than he used to.

Elias’s hands didn’t stop working the wire, but they slowed. Who’s doing the accounts now? Father, most nights after supper, Peter kept his eyes down. I can do the fieldwork fine. The books were always yours, and now they’re his again. How many men did he let go? Peter looked up, surprised by the question. None.

That’s why he’s doing half of it himself instead of paying someone to. Something in that answer sat heavier with Elias than the news about the bank had. He knew those men. had hired two of them himself back when hiring was still his to do. Peter kept talking mostly to the wire in his hands. He gets up earlier than he used to checks things twice he never used to check once.

Mother says he holds his chest sometimes when he thinks no one’s looking. Elias’s hand paused on the wire. One beat, no more, then went back to twisting it tight. That evening he ate less than usual and sat a long while afterward looking north toward hills he couldn’t see in the dark but knew the shape of anyway.

He warned me the ranch would pay for it. Elias said finally, not looking at her. Mabel considered that a moment. He warned you what might happen. A pause. You still made the choice you believed you could live with. She didn’t say it wasn’t his fault. She didn’t say it was. She only set a cup of coffee down near his elbow and left it there, and went back to her own work at the table, and let the house stay quiet around him for as long as he needed it to.

Peter’s Thursday visits had become enough of a habit that Mabel no longer thought to mention setting the extra plate. It was simply there when he came, and gone when the week passed without him. One week she sent him home with a jar of preserves wrapped in cloth. for your mother,” she said. Elias looked up from the harness he was mending.

“Mother can buy 10 of those if she wants them.” “I know.” Mabel went back to her stitching. He didn’t say anything else about it. Peter took the jar without comment either, and rode off with it balanced carefully against his knee the whole way home, as if it were something that might spill. The news came near the start of winter.

Not a letter, just Peter’s own mouth, relayed plain. Their father was thinner than he’d been in the fall and slower getting up in the mornings. That night, Mabel found Elias sitting at the table long after the lamp should have been put out. No work in front of him, just his hands folded and still. She didn’t ask what he was thinking.

She set a sheet of paper down near his elbow, a pencil across it, an envelope beside that. Then she said good night and went to bed. In the morning, the paper was exactly where she’d left it. Blank. She didn’t mention it. She folded it back into the drawer and started the coffee. The cold came early that year, a full 3 weeks ahead of what the almanac and the old-timers both expected, and it came hard enough that the grass stopped short and stayed stopped.

Elias walked the pasture the first morning of it, with his breath showing in front of him, and came back into the kitchen already doing sums in his head. “We’ll need to start on the stored hay now,” he said. Not December. Now Mabel had the ledger open before he’d finished the sentence. They went through it together.

What they had, what five head instead of 10 meant for how long the feed would stretch. What the reserve they’d refused to touch all year could still cover if it came to buying more. It came to buying some, not much. A neighbor down the road, caught with a bigger herd and a thinner margin, sold off six head at a price low enough to tempt anyone.

Elias looked at the offer a long moment, then looked at his own numbers and didn’t take it. Feed doesn’t stretch for six more mouths, he said, no matter what they cost. The winter held. Not easily. There were nights Mabel lay awake listening to the wind test the barn roof at the seam they’d patched, and mornings Elias broke ice on the trough before the sun was fully up.

But the fence kept the herd in. The barn kept the hay dry. The reserve, thin as it was, never ran to nothing. By the time the first green came back to the north pasture, the ledger had crossed from red into something closer to even, and stayed there. A calf came in April, healthy, the first born on land that was theirs. Elias mended the front gate that had sagged since the day they moved in, with the pasture recovered well past what five head could graze down.

A neighbor asked if Elias would take on a dozen of his cattle for the season. Grass being short on his own place and plentiful on theirs. Elias didn’t have to spend a dollar of capital to say yes. Only feed grass they already had and weren’t using in exchange for a fee paid monthly. Mabel wrote the arrangement into the ledger under its own heading and watched it fill in steady alongside the milk and egg money week after week.

By early summer, she added it all up on a Saturday morning before her shift and sat with the number longer than she needed to. At the store that afternoon, she untied her apron for what she told Mr. Hail would be the last time. “You sure?” he asked, not unkindly. “The figures say I can?” she folded the apron over the counter.

“For now?” He didn’t argue with her math. Nobody in that town ever had. One evening, not long after, Mabel found Elias standing at the north fence, looking toward hills he couldn’t see from there in the dark. “Thinking about them,” she asked. “He didn’t deny it.” She stood beside him a while before she spoke again.

“I spent years wishing I had a father to be angry with,” she said, quiet, not looking at him. “You still have one.” Elias didn’t answer. After a moment, he only put his arm around her, and they stood there until the cold sent them both back inside. It was nearly a year to the week since they’d driven away from the meric house with nothing but what fit in a wagon.

One morning in early summer, Elias hauled out the lumber he’d finally paid off in full and got to work on the porch. Mabel came out with coffee and stopped in the doorway. The porch? Looks like it finally made the list. She didn’t say anything else about it, only handed in the coffee and went to fetch the level.

Two of the boys from the children’s home came out that afternoon, the way they had most weeks all spring. One of them, the taller one, who’d once needed Elias to measure every board for him, marked and cut a rail on his own without being asked, and looked pleased with himself when nobody corrected it. By evening, the porch stood square and solid, the first thing on the place that hadn’t been patched, braced, or made to do until they could afford better.

Mabel brought the ledger out and sat down on the new boards beside him. Anything due before August? Elias looked it over. Nothing we can’t pay. That was the whole of it. No one said they’d made it. No one needed to. The following week, the ranch wagon rolled into the children’s home yard carrying milk, a dozen eggs, a sack of early vegetables, and a side of beef they could finally spare instead of scrape together.

The matron looked at the load. then at Mabel and didn’t say Jonas’s name. She didn’t need to. Children ran out to meet the wagon the way they always did. One of the boys who’d spent the spring learning fence and stalls at the ranch jumped up to help unload before anyone asked him to.

Moving like someone who already knew where everything went. That evening, Elias and Mabel ate supper on the new porch. The sky still light at that hour with summer coming on. Mabel set an extra plate out of habit before she remembered it was only Tuesday. He say he wasn’t coming? Elias asked, nodding at the empty seat. No, Mabel looked at it a moment. Just didn’t come.

Neither of them thought much of it. They sat out until the light went and then a while after. 3 days later, Peter missed his Thursday supper for the first time all year. Mabel didn’t think much of it until Saturday when hoof beatats came up the road toward evening hard and fast, faster than Peter had ever ridden out to see them, and no wagon behind him this time.

Elias was already crossing the yard before the horse had fully stopped. Peter swung down, breathing hard, the horse’s sides dark with sweat. Father’s sick. How bad? He hasn’t been out of bed in 4 days. Mother with him. Peter caught his breath. She sent me a beat. We need you home. Elias looked at Mabel. Mabel said nothing. That’s where we’ll leave Elias and Mabel for now. A year in.

A life built from almost nothing but savings, stubbornness, and a porch finally finished on land that’s truly theirs. But nothing that happened up at the Merrick ranch this past year has been settled. Jonas is sick enough to keep to his bed. Peter’s been carrying more than one man should. And the son who once laid his keys down on his father’s desk and walked out is about to walk back through that same door for the first time in a year.

Not as the heir Jonas once raised him to be, but as a man who built something of his own without a dollar of mer behind it. What happens when Elias comes home? Will Jonas welcome the son he once disowned? Or will old pride get in the way one more time? And what will it mean for Mabel to walk back into the house that once told her she wasn’t worthy of it? We’ll find out in part two.

If you enjoyed this story, let us know in the comments what you think Jonas will say when Elias walks back through that door. and subscribe so you don’t miss what happens