“Omnimancer, please say something,” Miss Harper said, looking at him now, her voice cracking.
“There is no romance,” he said slowly, trying to figure out how much to explain about a situation Beatrix had apparently said nothing whatsoever about.
She gaped. “I … I’m so sorry, I completely misread?—”
“No, you didn’t,” he said, unwilling to let her twist in the wind. “It’s just a complicated mess.” He steeled himself and pressed on. “I fell in love with her, and we think the Vow she took to do me no harm is forcing her to feel the same way about me.”
Miss Harper’s eyes widened. She frowned, then—thoughtful, not angry. “How do you know? How can you tell the difference between that and the real thing?”
It was so hard to put into words. He tried. “The timing, for one. She didn’t detect any romantic feelings for me until I developed them for her, and it happened almost at the same time. Consider what a dramatic shift it was—she’d disliked and distrusted me, for good reason. And we’ve had enough experience with the Vows to understand how overpowering they can be.”
“How so?” she said—quietly, nonconfrontationally.
And the dam broke. He told her almost everything.
How terrible the first Vow had been for Beatrix, how he should have undone it immediately and hadn’t. How they tied themselves more tightly together with each successive Vow until they found they could not extract themselves. He told her about the wrenching difficulty of not succumbing and the synchronous dreams (though he didn’t tell her what happened there—that was simply too much) and the guilt hefelt like an exoskeleton and his fear that Beatrix couldn’t take much more of it.
“Oh God,” he said, head in his hands, palms wet. “And I shouldn’t have told you any of that—Beatrix must have needed more time.”
“Who have you had to talk to about this?” she said. “Besides Beatrix, that is.”
His laugh was hollow. “No one. I’ve been going insane, Miss Harper.”
She took his hands and pulled them from his face, forcing him to look at her. “First off, I think it’s past time to drop the formalities and call me Lydia. Secondly, it seems to me that if you both loved each other—if youknewyou loved each other—these unbreakable Vows would be manageable. Better than manageable, even, given the advantages of a nightly meeting where no one else can snoop. What has turned this into soul-crushing horror is the knowledge, or at least the very strong suspicion, that Beatrix does not love you and is continually forced to feel as if she did.”
He nodded. “And if she ever stops fighting it …”
“That would be worse?”
“Yes. So it’s a trap with no way out.”
She sighed. “I wish I could think of something helpful.”
He wanted to explain what a relief it was just to tell this to someone, and what an undeserved gift it had been that she’d listened without judgment.
But as he opened his mouth, she added, “I hate to think of Beatrix holding this in all these months! She surely mustneed to—” She blinked. “Shehastalked to someone about it, hasn’t she. She’s told Ella.”
“Most of it,” he admitted. “Not all of it.”
“I’m glad,” Miss Harper—Lydia—said softly. “But I wish, you don’t know how much I wish, that we had the sort of relationship she and Ella have. It’s like … like Ella’s her sister, and not me.”
“She loves you,” he said. “Fiercely.”
“I know,” she said. “But I don’t think sheunderstandsme, and I’m sure I don’t truly understand her.”
He wondered if he could help them. He understood Beatrix. He’d been in her head, as she would say; he felt her emotions. He knew her on a deeper and more instinctual level than he knew anyone.
“And I hardly see her anymore,” Lydia said. “When she’s not working, she and Ella keep haring off out of town?—”
Wait. What?
“—though who could blame them,” she added, “with the house the way it is.”
“Where are they—” he began, but just then, the doorbell rang.
“Oh, goodness.” Lydia jumped to her feet. “It’s twenty-five after eight—that must be Rosemarie, come to get me for church.”
“Hang on,” he said, and ran to the brewing room, grabbing the last bottle of cold medicine. He handed it to her before opening the door.
