She met his gaze again, and her eyes were a little lighter. “Then I say yes.”
All right. There was something. A lifeline. He took a shaky inhalation. He still did not want her to see the true nature of his distress, though he still hated this impulse—this need—to hide anything from her.
He smiled sadly, feeling as if he were being shut back inside a cage. No, he was voluntarily retreating to it, which was something he was willing to do because he was—
“I am in love with a woman named Julianna Evans!”
Leander. Speaking a full sentence. His only sentence.Theonly sentence.
Effie and Julianna were still looking at each other in the mirror. Initially, he thought her eyes lightened even more. He almost fancied he saw a spark there. But no. Whatever he’d thought he’d seen was gone, replaced by an expression he could not read, and an unreadable expression on Julianna’s face was worse, to his mind, than one of sadness, or anger.
He had no earthly idea what to say. Should he deflect? Pretend innocence?The silly bird, how he lies!
He had the terrible feeling that Leander’s outburst had sealed his fate: He would not see her again, and she would not write to him, either.
“I see,” she said, before he could think how to try to salvage the situation. “I shall go, then. I never wanted to hurt you.”
But she had.
Did intention matter? If someone didn’t want to hurt you but they did anyway, did that make the hurt somehow less?
If you got into a cage willingly, did that make your incarceration any less painful?
A terrible sadness had come over him. He was a hollow man. Everything light and joyous and careful had been scooped out of him, leaving him a shell.
“I had hoped to go sea-bathing again,” she said quietly. She took a step back, toward the door, but she kept her gaze on his.
It took him a moment to adjust to the mundane statement. “Yes, we’d planned to, hadn’t we?”
“I got . . . caught up in our nights together indoors.”
He supposed he could suggest that they go now. He could give her one more swim at dawn before she left him.
He thought of Leander—the mythical hero, not the bird—drowning, and he said nothing.
Unlike Leander, Effie had some sense of self-preservation. It was somewhat shocking to realize it, but it was true.
He could not swim across the stormy strait if Julianna wouldn’t hang a light for him. He could not make such a journey when he knew the outcome would be a watery death. Even for her, he could not do it. His hollow body was riddled with holes, with injuries he’d accumulated over a lifetime and in recent days. If he attempted such a swim, he would sink to the seafloor like a stone.
“I am in love with a woman named Julianna Evans!” Leander said.
“Yes,” Effie said to the bird. “We heard you the first time.”
After holding his gaze in the mirror for another long moment, Julianna left.
Chapter 12
Advice for the Heartsick
Effie stayed up, keeping a vigil of sorts in the dark. At various points, he told himself to stand down. The problem was, he didn’t knowhowto. How could he possibly sleep in this last stretch of hours before she left? How could he do anything with her under the same roof, here but as good as gone? He was in limbo, in a terrible purgatory of his own making.
An idea took root. He pulled out the last letter he had yet to answer for December.
Dear Miss Heartsick,
I probably ought not to answer your letter, not because you are unmarried and appealing to the author of a column entitled “Advice for Married Ladies,” but because I am unqualified to do so. I do not know if it is possible to die of a broken heart. Plays, and poetry, tell us it is possible. Why, I wonder, did Shakespeare write tragic lovers whose fates ended in death and comedic lovers who were united in marriage by play’s end but nothing in between? Where is the story of the brokenhearted fool who picked himself up and kept going? The spurned lover who didnotdrown?
Perhaps you can write such a story for yourself. I hope so.
