Page 57 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“That’s not fair!” Betsy protested. “You’re visiting, and I thought the first aid course would be something for us to do together.”

An ironical expression spread across Ava’s face. “So it’s all for me, is it?”

“You’re my guest.”

“Because you begged me to come!” Ava took a deep breath, placing her palms flat on the marble tabletop. “Betsy. Please understand that I am truly grateful for the opportunity to be here. And I do—I do want only the best for you. But I can’t sit here and watch you destroying yourself. Again.”

“Again?” Betsy demanded, offended, before realizing that really, she ought to be offended at the idea she would destroy herself at all.

Ava was pale but resolute. “You’re doing everything except what you’re actually here to do. It’s just like Smith.”

It was not just like Smith. Betsy blurted out her cunning plan. “If I come back a war hero, Dr. Richardson will have to let me excavate!”

Ava blinked at her. “Is that what this is about? Betsy—that’s the most harebrained scheme I’ve ever heard.”

“What’s so harebrained about it?” demanded Betsy, stung. “Dr. Richardson thinks women don’t have the stamina to excavate? Fine. I’ll show him stamina. When I come back, he won’t be able to tell me I’m too delicate to wield a shovel. We’ve both agreed I can’t marry my way into a dig. What other options do I have?”

Ava took a deep breath. “Have you considered putting in the work?”

“I’ve been working!” Betsy thought of all those months of haunting Richardson’s office, going on treks, climbing Mount Helicon, transcribing endless epigraphs. The hideous unfairness of it rose up to choke her. Or maybe that was just the pastry she seemed to have forgotten to chew. Betsy gulped it down in one furious swallow. “It doesn’t matter what I do. Dr. Richardson won’t listen!”

“Maybe because you don’t try.”

Betsy’s throat closed up. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t cry in the middle of a tea shop on one of the most fashionable streets in Athens. “I don’t try?” she choked out. “You won’t even apply!”

Ava pressed her eyes very tightly shut. “We’re not going to start that again.”

“Why not?” Betsy demanded recklessly. “If you get to pull my character to shreds, then I get to shred yours too.”

“I’m not shredding—”

“Aren’t you? But let’s just have a word about glass houses, shall we? What are you going to do, be a companion your whole life? Go from elderly relative to elderly relative until you’re elderly yourself? At least I came out here, Ava! I applied! I tried! You won’t even put in an application to medical school.”

Ava’s dark brows drew together. “So I can throw away money I don’t have on a job no one will let me pursue?”

“How do you know they won’t? Look at Dr. Kalopothakes.”

“Dr. Kalopothakes trained in Paris. Do you think she could have found someplace to take her in the US?”

“Yes! And even if she couldn’t, what’s wrong with Paris?” Betsy could just see it, la vie bohème, a garret with a pile of medical textbooks and a skeleton named Pierre, Ava joking in French with weedy French medical students. “Your French is beautiful, much better than my Greek.”

“What’s wrong with Paris?” Ava repeated. Something in her seemed to snap. “What’s wrong with Paris is that not everyone is an heiress! Not everyone can jaunt off to Europe on a whim! I have eight younger siblings, Betsy! My parents can’t afford to throw away money on a profession I’ll never be allowed to pursue!”

Betsy decided to tackle the easier bit of that objection. “What makes you think you couldn’t pursue it?”

“Don’t you think I haven’t thought of that?” Ava breathed in deeply through her nose. “How many women doctors do you know? I don’t mean Dr. Kalopothakes. I mean back home.”

Betsy scrounged for any vague recollection. “There’s Elizabeth Blackwell.”

Ava folded her arms across her chest. “She moved back to England.”

“I’m sure there must be others.”

“Yes, women with means. Women who can afford to work without pay. Women like you.” Ava glared at Betsy as though Betsy were personally responsible for being a carpet heiress. It wasn’t Betsy’s fault that Ava’s grandparents had frittered away their fortune on short-lived communes and the publication of transcendentalist essays that no one wanted to read. “No one would let me practice on them. No one would pay me to practice on them. I was barely tolerated trailing around after my father holding his medical bag.”

“That’s why you shouldn’t lose this opportunity.” Betsy leaned forward, feeling on firmer ground. “This is your chance to do what you love to do. All right, maybe no one will pay you for it, but you’ll get to wallow in wounds all you like. And then if you hate it you can go back to winding wool or whatever else it is that companions do, but at least you’ll know you aren’t missing anything. And it won’t cost you anything. You’re already here.”

Betsy had her, she knew it. She could see Ava thinking it through, weighing her words.