“When she goes back to Thornfield and it’s a burned-out husk?”
“Hmm. It’s not what you’d call a happy ending, is it?”
“What? No, it’s beautiful. How she finds him again and sort of hints he’s not totally blind—”
“Who’s blind?”
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Alex Ritter was not a close reader. “Rochester. From the fire,” I reminded him. “When he tried to save his first wife from the burning building, but she leaped to her death instead? Which is tragic, but also handy for Jane because, goodbye, bigamy!”
He was staring as though I’d spoken a foreign language. With painful slowness, my brain pieced together the puzzle.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Didn’t quite make it that far,” he admitted without the faintest trace of shame. “To recap, house burns down, he goes blind, she comes to find him, and then?”
“They get married.” I reported this with the robotic inflection of someone who has been shocked into a catatonic state.
A slow grin spread across his face. “That’s exactly what I needed to know.”
I swallowed, unsure where to direct my gaze. The force of his attention was like standing in a spotlight. “It is?”
“Essay test next period.”
“How could you not finishJane Eyre? It’s so ... juicy.” I had been on the point of sayingromantic,but pulled back in time.
“Busy week,” he replied, with the insouciant air of someone accustomed to charming his way out of trouble. “I got to the part where that creepy family takes her in. Seemed obvious she was going to marry the boring preacher guy and settle in with the sister-wives for a life of tea and embroidery.”
“That is so incredibly wrong.”
“I know.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice to a confidential murmur. “Thanks to you.”
Heat simmered beneath my skin, a red tide of outraged sensibilities. His laissez-faire attitude—in literatureandlove—offended me almost as much as the fact that I’d been unwittingly embroiled in his cheating.
“Wait,” I said, as he turned to go. “Don’t you want to know about theveryend?”
He raised his brows in question.
“There’s an epilogue. It turns out Bertha—the homicidal first wife—isn’t really dead.”
“After jumping off the roof?”
“She’s pretty messed up,” I improvised. “Extremely bedraggled. And she’s kind of ... singed. And limping.”
“Sounds twisted.”
“It is. Especially when she breaks into their house at night—Rochester and Jane’s. And then there’s a big fight, but since Rochester is still mostly blind it’s up to Jane to save the day.”
“And does she?”
I nodded. “Nobody messes with Jane. She stabs Bertha. With a kind of ... dagger.” Though I was tempted to embellish the description, it seemed wiser not to push my luck.
“Wow.” He looked back at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. Hopefully it wasn’t suspicion. “I guess I should have kept reading.”
“Mm-hm,” I agreed, smiling sweetly.
“Finally!” Arden exclaimed when I made it to lunch. Before I could explain the nature of the delay, she nudged her phone across the table, watching me with barely contained glee. “Check it out.”
A patchwork of pictures filled the screen, but my eye went to the words unfurling in ornate script across the top. “Bad Guys from Books?” I read aloud.
