Renegade by Caroline Lee

you that it’s very different from Beckett.”
    “Robert is your friend?”
    “Yes.” He didn’t elaborate. After the way Pearl had treated Robert, Mac wanted to keep his friend safe.
    “Pearl is my sister, Mac.” Becks started to roll her sleeves down her forearm, and he found that he missed the sight of that golden skin. “She’s half a year younger than me. My father…” She swallowed. “My parents didn’t much care for each other, and as soon as my mother was breedin’, he went elsewhere.” A flush rose on her cheeks, but Mac didn’t comment. Her father’s actions were hardly unusual. “Pearl’s mother was a slave named Mimi. She’d already born my father two sons, and one was still alive then. My mother had a son, too, who’d caught the measles and died before I was born.”
    She looked up at him then. “After I was born, my parents had an argument. Mother never told me what it was about, but…” She took a deep breath and held it. “This is her land. Her home. Her cousin got the original Beckett home, the one that burned years ago. But my mother grew up here, and it was her dowry. My father was…a difficult man to live with. And my mother doesn’t take kindly to being bullied. So I don’t know what that particular argument was about... But Father was apparently quite angry.” Her hands were clasped in front of her, the knuckles white. “He couldn’t touch my mother, but he hurt Mimi badly. Pearl was born early, and Mimi didn’t survive.”
    Mac crossed his arms and propped his hip against the work table, wondering what she was trying to tell him. When she asked, “Do you know what milk-sisters are?” He nodded. Of course he did. He and Ramsey had both been nursed by one of the slaves at Baird’s Cove so that their mother didn’t have to.
    Becks took a deep breath, and he felt like she was about to impart a secret. “My mother nursed both of us, Mac. My father had fathered another child on a slave, and had killed that slave, but she wasn’t going to let Pearl die, too. She freed her and nursed her and kept her safe from my father. Her brother died before the year was out—I don’t know from what, she never said. But Pearl has been my sister since before I knew what sisters were.”
    He realized she’d been ringing her hands, as though confessing some deep secret. He didn’t know what to say in response, so he kept his mouth shut. He’d always guessed that Eugenia was a remarkable woman, but he’d never known just how eccentric she really was. Freeing a half-white baby hadn’t been unheard of back before the war, if the master had a conscience and knew his duty. He’d even heard of a few mistresses who did it. But to nurse that baby? To treat it like your own? He didn’t think there was anyone else out there who would have done that. He wondered why she’d made that decision.
    “Do you understand?”
    He told the truth. “No.” He didn’t understand what she was trying to tell him.
    Becks sighed. She didn’t look like she’d napped today at all. “Beckett is Pearl’s home as much as it is mine. But she doesn’t love it, not the way I do.” Mac raised an eyebrow, which caused her to swallow and look away. Of course Pearl wouldn’t love it. How could anyone, knowing what her father had done to her mother, love it here? “She’s not… secure. She doesn’t know what she wants from life. From her future. And here you are, threatening her future.”
    His first instinct was to deny it, but he tamped down on it. If he decided to end his partnership with Eugenia, he had no idea how that would affect her daughter and Pearl. Finally, for lack of something better to do, he pulled down the towel from his shoulder and hung it over the rack by the stove. “We’re not here to threaten anyone’s future.” That, at least, was the truth. Any change that came from his visit was unintentional.
    “Why are you here, Mac?” His back was to her, and he placed his palms on the