“Sorry,” he gasped, pulling away.
Lifting a hand to press it to her stinging face, she noticed the watch—his watch—on her wrist. For the second time, she undid the clasp with fingers made clumsy by her zeal to get it off. “Take it. It’s yours.”
He winced. “Keep it. I want you to have a watch that works.”
“You want me to think of you every time I see it!”
“Daggett ...”
“Go. Please go.”
He nodded. For a heart-stopping moment he simply looked at her. Then he teleported away, and she fell back on her pillow, drained and wretched.
So this, then, was the end of her misbegotten adventure. Nothing happy about it.
25
Retreat
“Hmm,” Bernie said, looking over Emily’s shoulder at the lifeless panorama that was the Daggett farm in February—beautiful in a stark sort of way, but mainly stark. Rain fell in a desultory fashion from the mottled-gray sky. “Why don’t you let me turn your rocking chair around? View’s abitof a downer, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Perfectly illustrates how I feel,” she said.
“Ah, come on—you’re out of the hospital.”
“For all the good it does me.”
Bernie pulled up another chair and sat beside her. “You just need to take it easy for a while.”
“I’m thoroughly sick of taking it easy,” she snapped, then instantly regretted venting her anger and unhappiness on him. Bernie had never let her down. “I’m sorry. I hate just sitting here, and ...” She thought of tellinghim both reasons her life was unraveling but settled on one. “And I won’t have a job to go back to when I’m better.”
“They’re not going to blame you for getting stabbed!”
She shook her head. “That’s not it. I never finished any new research, never got better than adequate at lecturing—I let myself get completely distracted by magic. And it’s just a one-year contract. The only other offers I got last year were piecework—four courses spread acrossfourcolleges—and you can’t live on that.”
“Well ... there’s always high school history.”
She sighed the deepest of sighs. She’d been attracted to academic life by the prospect of researching, not teaching, and there wasn’t even the pretense of the former in high school. But what else could she do now?
“Something will turn up,” Bernie said, patting her on the shoulder. “Besides, this isn’t the time to worry about what to do with the rest of your life. This is the time to wallow decadently in the joy of having a life to live.”
Good advice she doubted she could take. Besides all the quite reasonable emotions battering her right now, she also felt irrationally put out. Fantasy characters did not push through the final battle only to discover afterward that nothing had been nicely wrapped up, damn it.
Bernie cleared his throat.
“Sorry,” she muttered, “I’ve moved past joy to the why-the-heck-do-I-still-hurt phase of recovery.”
Her body felt no worse than it had three days ago, but three days ago she still had the counterbalancing expectation that everything would work out with—
“Hartgrave,” Bernie said.
She sucked in a startled breath. “Sorry, what did you say?”
He grimaced. “That you’re in nearly as bad a mood as Hartgrave. I know it’s none of my business, but have you broken it off?”
Well, she had known the question would come at some point. She nodded, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the thought of all the follow-ups.
“Ah,” he said.
