But I don’t know if she hears me say this. She just continues to speak to the panes of window glass. “The day before I married James, I walked over to Elliot’s carpentry shop to ask him if he would give me away. I wasn’t trying to be cruel; I thought it would help him let me go and pursue a life of his own with someone. But when I asked him, he just said, ‘Don’t marry him, Bel. Please.’ I told him I loved James and why couldn’t he just be happy for me, and he said I barely knew James and that all he’s ever wanted was for me to be happy. He said it wasn’t because of how he felt aboutme that he didn’t want me to marry James; it was because of the way James looked at me, like he was looking right past me. Elliot said he knows how a man who loves me should be looking at me.”
Tears are trailing down her cheeks again. She turns her head to look at me. I guess she was talking to me after all.
“I begged him to give me away anyway, and he just smiled and said he could never give me away. That he never will.”
“He sounds like a good friend.” I set a cup of tea in front of her that smells like wildflowers.
She dabs at her eyes with a napkin before taking a sip from the cup. I sit down on the chair next to her with my own cup.
We are both quiet for a moment. “How could I have been so stupid?” Belinda finally says.
“I’ve made plenty of decisions I wish I hadn’t made,” I say. “You weren’t being stupid. You lost your father and were hurting. He made you feel better. You trusted him.”
Belinda stares at me for a long moment. “You don’t seem as devastated as I am about all of this,” she says in a numb voice.
“I don’t love Martin. I have never loved him.”
Her mouth drops open. “But you are married to him!”
“Yes.”
“How can you be married to someone you have never loved?”
I take a sip of tea. And then I tell her how.
11
As Belinda comprehends fully the arrangement I made with Martin, an unmistakable pang of pity crosses her face.
“Why didn’t you want to marry for love?” she asks, incredulous.
I decide in that moment to tell her the barest minimum. “Because there was once a man I thought I loved and who I thought loved me. But I was wrong.”
“What happened?”
“It wasn’t love.”
She waits for me to say more. But I don’t.
And I won’t.
Belinda seems to need a moment to make sense of this decision and the route the turns of the earth have taken me on. Have taken her on. How we have ended up in this same place together.
After another long moment she asks, “But... but you shared a bed with James?”
“That wasn’t love, either. The man you know as James doesn’t love me. I don’t love him. It isn’t love.”
I can see how troubled she is by the fact that she had been spellbound by Martin’s affections and I hadn’t.
“Martin doesn’t care for me, not in that way, Belinda. He never wanted me to love him. He must have behaved differently with you.” I can’t help but look down at her stomach.
“Yes,” Belinda says, and I see pain etching itself in a sad half smile as she touches her swollen belly.
“Tell me how you met him.”
She lifts her gaze and turns her head slowly to again stare out the window, as though she can see her past in the glass. “He came to the inn a few months after my father died. He arrived in an automobile, something I hardly ever see. I’d been in my garden and I had dirt on the hem of my skirt and under my fingernails, and there he stood, the most beautiful person I had ever seen.”
I nod even though Belinda is not looking at me. I know the awe she is speaking of. I felt it, too, the moment I opened the envelope containing Martin’s response to my letter and saw his photograph peeking out from underneath a one-way train ticket.
