“Please?” Conrad motions to the room he just came out of. It is a sitting room paneled with bookshelves. A cheery fire is blazing. Pages of a newspaper lie open on a mahogany desk, and the chair is pulled out. A pipe sits on a brass holder, ready to be lit. The room is warm and wonderful.
If I had been any other caller, Conrad would have no doubt asked me to sit down and perhaps rung for tea. But after I admire the room, I turn to see that he is standing in the middle just like I am, looking at me. I don’t care. I don’t want to sit and pretend this is just an ordinary social call.
“I had to see you,” I say, in answer to his unspoken question.
“Is everything all right?” he asks, but I can see that this isn’t what he is most curious about. He wants to know why I have come, unbidden, to his house.
“Perhaps.” I want to say that I have come with a proposition. A solution to our dilemma. A way for us to have what we want. All that we want.
He finally remembers his manners. “Would you like to sit down?” he says, wide-eyed but polite.
What I must say will not entail a long visit that requires chairs or tea. I move toward him, and I take his hands in mine. “What I would like, Conrad, is to spend my life with you.”
He sucks in his breath, fully unprepared for this answer I’ve given him, but not completely surprised and definitely not repulsed by it. I see in his eyes he has already thought of this, too: what it would be like for him and me to be together. For a second he imagines it again, but then he shakes his head. “That is impossible.”
“No. It is not impossible,” I reply. “It might be difficult. Certainly different. But it’s not impossible.”
“Evelyn.” He says my name but nothing else. What I am about to propose has not occurred to him. And why should it have? It is the most outlandish, unheard-of, remarkable, singularly amazing answer to the question that has been haunting us both. I swallow back any trace of fear and I tighten my hold on his hands.
“I will help you take care of Sybil,” I say. “We can watch over her together. Here. In this house.”
“What are you saying?” Conrad’s voice is airy with surprise.
“I’m saying you and I can care for her. For as long as she draws breath. I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine and together we’ll care for her.”
He stares at me as the full weight of what I am suggesting begins to fall on him. “I don’t understand. How would you be mine?” he says.
I am already yours,my heart replies. “I would be yours to whatever extent you would want me to be,” I say aloud. “You said the other day at the asylum that I deserve to be happy. I can’t be happy if I am not with you.”
Conrad closes his eyes and swallows hard. “But—” he begins.
“But you can’t abandon her. I know you can’t. I’m not asking you to. I can care for her. I know how to care for her.”
His gaze is intense as he studies the features of my face. I can’t tell if he’s imagining his lips on every part of me or memorizing my contours before he refuses me and sends me away. His eyes glisten.
“I love you, Conrad,” I tell him, when he says nothing. “I won’t love anyone else. I can’t.”
He pulls me to him then and kisses me and I taste salt where his tears and mine mingle. It is not the kiss of raw, physical desire that we shared in the shed. It is instead the melding of two wounded hearts that somehow, after all that has happened to both of us, can still love. I could die this moment and be happy.
Conrad breaks away first and kisses my forehead. “I can’t ask you to live here, with me and Sybil, as... as my mistress, Evelyn.”
“You’re not asking me to.”
“But I could never debase you that way. I just couldn’t.”
I place my hand over his heart, and I can feel it pulsing beneath his shirt. I was destined to love only this man just as Maggie was destined to love only Jamie. It is inevitable that he and I will be together. “Then don’t.”
