Maybe he did not really have a full picture of who she was, only the frustrating person that she pretended to be. Bridget clenched her jaw, her pride a little wounded.
“Maybe you are right,” Bridget mumbled.
“That does happen on occasion,” Dorothy said, her tone kind.
“But it does not matter,” Bridget insisted. “Even if I showed him who I really am, that does not change his desire to have this only be a convenient arrangement. He may never give me what I want, and I am uncertain that I am even in the right to ask for more.”
“You have never hesitated to make your desires clear before,” Dorothy noted. “Why do you hesitate with your husband?”
Bridget could not quite explain it. She just knew instinctively that if she admitted that she wanted more, something deeper and fonder between herself and her husband, it would be confessing some small defeat. It would be making a concession, and Bridget had never enjoyed accepting defeat, no matter how small.
“You should be honest with him,” Dorothy continued. “I know you will not like hearing that, but it is true.”
“I never like your advice,” Bridget said.
She looked at her sister, who grinned. “I know. To be fair, I think most people dislike receiving advice. That is because the best advice one can offer most often involves doing something difficult or undesirable.”
“Yes.”
Bridget gave Dorothy a soft smile. “I do not know how you have the patience sometimes,” Bridget said.
Dorothy shook her head. “I don’t know. If your husband rejects you, it will hurt, but you will eventually recover. You are too strong to be defeated by such a blow, Bridget. And if he does receive the real you positively, you have the chance of making yourself into something even better. Ideally, that is what marriage is about; it is discovering the best in yourself and others.”
Bridget nodded, even as doubt crept inside her. Dorothy painted the ideal marriage as such a lofty goal, and Bridget did not know how she could ever manage to achieve such.
“I will think about what you have said,” Bridget insisted. “I will.”
But thinking about advice that someone had given and acting upon such advice were two entirely different things.
Lewis sat across from his grandmother, his attention fixed entirely on his grandmother’s leg, which she had not ceased bouncing up and down ever since he had entered. He clenched his jaw, trying to decide how to approach the woman’s clear restlessness. It was not the movement that he found vexing, of course. Rather, that movement meant his grandmother was unusually distressed, which left Lewis with two potentially undesirable options.
First, he could ignore the movement and hope that whatever had made his grandmother more anxious than usual ceased to bother her. It was entirely possible that she did not even notice the movement and would, indeed, be more distraught if he drew attention to it. The second option was that he could ask what was distressing her and potentially remove that troublesome thing, whatever it might be, and bring his grandmother some peace of mind.
He sighed deeply. “Do you want to talk to me about something?”
She visibly started, her teacup rattling a little in her hand. A flicker of guilt crossed her face, and Lewis inwardly winced, wondering if his question had been more accusatory than he had intended for it to be. It was difficult to know if his grandmother’s nerves were particularly bad sometimes or if he was just too blunt, as he sometimes was.
“You seem as though something is distressing you,” Lewis continued, softening his tone. “If you want to tell me what it is, I might be able to help.”
Sometimes, his poor grandmother could not even identify the source of her distress.
“You have not let me meet your new wife,” his grandmother said.
All the air left Lewis’s lungs in a greatwhoosh. “Oh,” he said.
A vague numbness swept over him, for he had not anticipated discussing his wife at all.
“I want to meet her.”
“You shall,” Lewis said. “When the time is right.”
“But when will that be? It is far past time for any respectable man to introduce his wife to his relatives,” she continued, her teacup clattering loudly against its saucer. “I did not even attend the wedding?—”
“By your own choice,” Lewis interrupted. “And I understand why you did not attend the wedding. But I fear that my wife would be terribly taxing on your nerves, and it is for the best that you not meet her just yet.”
His grandmother set aside her teacup and saucer and instead clasped her hands tightly in her lap, as though she was trying to hide the way that her body moved restlessly, refusing to submit to her control.
“I have given it a great deal of thought,” she said. “I want to meet her.”
