“We were worried. It is not as though we doubted you or your ability to take proper care of yourself and make the right choice – but we could see what you were doing to yourself. Letting fear make your decisions.”
It was easy for Jane to agree, because she had nothing to hide anymore.
“It was fear, entirely. I knew it, even at the time.” She glanced down at her glass, then up again. “I had seen what marriage could look like – how much it could take from you, and I did not understand then that the shape of a thing depends enormously on who is holding it. I thought I was protecting myself. I was only denying myself.”
Penelope tilted her head thoughtfully. “And what changed your mind, in the end? Was it Reuben?”
Jane considered the question and then slowly smiled.
“It was all of it, I suppose,” she responded slowly. “Reuben. Thomas. The way the house felt – alive, after it had been so quiet for so long. I think – I think I had believed, for a very long time, that loving someone required losing yourself. That being a wife meant becoming an echo. And then I was one, in practice if not in name, and it was not like that at all. I argued. I disagreed. I made decisions without permission and was not punished for them. I did not become smaller. If anything –”
She stopped, blinking as a realization took shape in her mind.
“If anything?” Nora prompted.
Jane looked across the room at Thomas, who was now clearly in the middle of a conversation that required him to use both hands to illustrate something, while Cecil nodded with great seriousness and Godric appeared to be attempting to keep a straight face.
“If anything,” she said, “I became more myself than I had ever been.”
Nora smiled, slow and satisfied.
“Good,” she nodded sagely. “That is exactly what we hoped.”
The ball continued and Jane continued to float contentedly, from one end of the room to the other, greeting guests and appreciating them for their attendance.
Just as she had begun to think the night bore no chance for any sort of surprise, her mother appeared.
Harriet without her husband, which Jane noticed immediately and she stood a little apart from the crowd for a moment, looking very unsure of herself and the decisions that had led her there. Eventually, she spotted Jane, and when she did, something like relief flickered across her features.
Jane felt her own chest tighten as she remained rooted on the spot, not move toward her mother, or moving away either.
Harriet came to stand before her, her hands folded neatly in front of her, and she was quiet for a moment before she spoke.
“The ball is beautiful,” she told Jane quietly. “You have done very well.”
“Thank you,” Jane said carefully.
There was a long pause that weighed down the air between them.
“Jane,” Harriet began, and then stopped, pressing her lips together, before she tried again. “I had an argument with your father. After you left. I told him – I told him that you were right.”
Jane said nothing, and her silence urged Harriet to continue.
“You were right,” her mother said again, more quietly. “About all of it. About me. I forgot myself. I cannot tell you when it happened, or exactly how, but I looked up one day and realized that I had not said what I thought in so long that I was no longer certain what I thought about anything.”
She exhaled slowly, her eyes pleading as she continued, “You do not have to be like me. You never did. And I should have been the one to tell you that, not the one who gave you reason to fear it.”
Jane felt the complicated weight of her mother’s words settle in her chest – the hurt of years, the love that had never entirely gone away, the grief of having needed a mother and found only an echo of one.
“I have no intention of being like you were. I will not hurt my child the way I was hurt. I will not give up who I am for anyone.” She held her mother's gaze. “And I will not pretend that what you did – what you chose, all those years – did not harm me. Because it did.”
Harriet's eyes filled with pain, but she took it all gracefully with a nodded.
“I did not expect anything less. I was awful to you – I acted abhorrently and I betrayed and hurt you severely,” she said. “I know it was hard to endure all of that as long as you did. And I am sorry, Jane. Truly. You have always been the best part of me,regardless of how poorly I showed it. You are the only good thing I have gotten out of that marriage, and I spent years failing to protect you from the worst of it. I only hope – if you will allow it – that I might have another chance. To be your mother properly. And to know my grandchild, if you would permit it.”
Jane looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, “One chance, Mother. That is all you get – perhaps more than you deserve. Do not waste it.”
Harriet nodded, pressing her lips together against what might have been a sob.
