“You didn’t understand what?”
“I didn’t understand that for me, being your friend is nearly as painful as being physically intimate with you but not being able to truly belong to you.”
Julianna inhaled sharply. He might as well have slapped her. Never in a hundred lifetimes would she have imagined Effie forsaking her. But what could she do? She couldn’t make him stay. If she had indeed been bending him to her will as he’d suggested, she could no longer allow herself to do so. “So this is goodbye.”
“This is goodbye.” He nodded as if punctuating what he’d just said. He stared at her for a long time.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I truly am.”
“I know you are. Goodbye, Jules.”
* * *
It was early, and dark. Julianna didn’t expect anyone to be in the office this early on a Sunday.
He looked up from where he’d been bent over his desk—his desk that was in the center of the room, flush with hers, the way it used to be.
“Father!” she cried. What was he doing here?Howwas he here?
His fond smile pierced her chest. Oh, how she missed him. Oh, how she missed the magazine they used to make together, without the meddling of any Glanvils.
She was hit with a wave of exhaustion so fierce, her limbs grew weak. She had been working so hard. Sometimes, producing the magazine in the Glanvil era made her feel as if she were pushing a boulder up a hill—alone. Father having returned threw into sharp relief how terribly lonely she was.
But she didn’t have to be anymore. He was here. She didn’t understandhow, but he was. She made to go to him, but something stopped her. There was a barrier between them, nothing she could see or feel, but it was there all the same. She tried again, approaching from the other side of his desk. She could not get close to him.
He was trying to speak. He seemed to know what this invisible barrier was. She stopped trying to surmount the barrier so she could listen. So he could explain.
“Would you repeat that, Father?”
His lips were moving, but no sound was coming out. Julianna began to grow agitated.
“I can’t hear you! Speak up!”
Father kept “talking,” but no sound came out. The longer it went on, the more her distress intensified.
Tears gathered. Julianna tried so hard not to cry. She wasn’t certain where this extreme aversion to crying had come from, except that she feared that once she started crying, she would never stop.
Usually, she had some amount of control. When Mr. Glanvil’s actions threatened to summon tears, she thought of the larger picture.The magazine above all.
Here, now, though, she feared she could not hold back the tears. As with the time she had read the letter from Effie that closed with his formal name, they were too strong, too powerful. She was at the bottom of a massive waterfall with an insufficient parasol.
She brushed them away angrily. She was angry with herself, for crying. She was angry with Father, for not being able to make himself heard. She was angry with Effie, for . . . for what? Why was she angry with Effie, who had given her everything she could ever want? A brilliant trove of Mrs. Landers letters each month. The sea.
His heart.
As she was swiping tears off her cheeks, her fingers grazed against something unfamiliar near her ear.
What was that?
She checked the other ear. It was there, too, something soft but foreign.
She pulled.
She had scraps of muslin balled up inside her ears! No, not scraps, a long, thin piece in each ear. She kept pulling and pulling. As she neared the end of each length, she began hearing her father.
“You don’t have to be alone,” he said.
Except, it wasn’t his voice coming out of his mouth; it was her own.
