“You have fallen in love with your husband, then?” Sophie asked. She pulled the bench from the end of her bed so she could face Hazel, who sat in the wooden chair.
“I don’t know,” Hazel said, shaking her head as she folded the wet handkerchief. “But that is why I am here, feeling . . . ridiculous. I need to make sense of what I do feel, and I don’t know how. I never believed I would need to understand what love between a man and woman can truly be, and without knowing that, how can I know what it is I’m feeling?”
“Well, then,” Sophie said, sitting up straight and smiling warmly. “You have come to the right place. We shall figure this out, you and me, and both be better for it. Let us begin with the resistance you feel toward admitting that you are in love with Duncan.”
Hearing his name made Hazel swallow. This was not a conversation on the ethereal nature of love; this was about Duncan. A real person. A person she cared for deeply. “To love him will change everything.”
“That is true,” Sophie said with a nod. “But everything changing is not necessarily a bad thing.”
Hazel looked up from the twisted handkerchief in her hands and met Sophie’s eye. “Not a bad thing? After all we—well, mostly you—have done for this school? How could I choose anything other than this dream?”
“If a new dream, a better dream, comes about, why would you choose a lesser one?”
“How can I say this is lesser?”
“How can you say it is not?”
Hazel sighed, remembering the day she’d let Sophie read Duncan’s letter and they’d had a similar discussion.
Sophie spoke before Hazel could. “A few years ago, you would never have believed you could buy a school to teach advanced studies for girls and staff it with female experts in every field. But you’ve done that. Why is it so impossible to believe that after a year of living with a man, you could find yourself in love with him?”
“Because I am not a . . . normal woman. I cannot live that life.”
“Dear Hazel, you are the smartest woman I know. Do not insult your own intelligence by saying something so incredibly stupid.”
“It would never work,” Hazel said.
“What would never work?”
“A life with Duncan,” Hazel said. “He is so . . . strange, and together we are ridiculous—my broken body and his broken brain. I am certain people laugh at us behind our backs.”
“When have you ever cared what people thought enough to choose a different course? You fought to learn more than the teachers could teach you. You’ve taught mathematics for a decade despite plenty of people believing you could not possibly do so.”
Hazel shook her head. “It is not the same thing. I am not explaining it right.”
“Then take your time and explain it right,” Sophie said. “What are you afraid of?”
Hazel stared into her lap and thought hard for two full minutes, then she raised her head and faced her friend. “I want to be happy here, at our school, doing what I had planned to do from the start of this crazy arrangement, but I fear this last year has ruined me for finding joy here.”
“Because you found so much joy in your life with Duncan?”
Hazel felt her chin tremble. “I came to love it, Sophie, and I think I came to love him too.” She clenched her eyes closed against having said the words out loud. Making them real. “I managed a home, and I was part of a community. Duncan and I had the most fascinating discussions, and I knew that everything he told me was the truth.”
She thought back to that dinner where Duncan had asked her to stay and had said that their year of living as husband and wife had been the most enjoyable of his life. He’d meant it, and she’d known it. And then she’d left the next day before he’d returned home from the office.
“He didn’t care about my foot, he didn’t care that I wasn’t sure if I believed in God or not, he just wanted me to be with him. He just wanted to enjoy my company.”
“And you left,” Sophie summed up.
Hazel nodded and swallowed. “And I left.”
“Why?”
“Because it wasn’t real,” Hazel said, looking at the desk to avoid seeing Sophie’s realization of the trick she and Duncan had played on everyone. “We agreed to live together for one year to satisfy the demands of my uncle. He set the terms in hopes that we would fall in love and want to continue that life, but I want this life.” She waved her hand to indicate the school. “I do. But . . . I want that one too, and I can’t have it, which casts this life, which was once so bright and shiny, into a pale light.”
“And the life with Duncan is bright and shiny now?”
“No,” Hazel said. “It is pale, too. I must choose one over the other, but whichever path I take means I shall miss the other, which will ruin them both.” She paused and took a breath. “It is impossible. I knew from the beginning that I would leave. I never gave myself to him or to that life, not fully. To go back means it would have to be real, and I don’t know if that is possible. I don’t know . . . ” She swallowed as the truth of her next words cut through her. “I don’t know that he can love me, not really, not the way I want him too.”
“And how do you want him to love you?”
“The way a normal man would love a normal woman.” She growled and shook her head in frustration of how words were failing her. “He is not a normal man, Sophie. He can’t look me in the eye for more than few seconds, and he fixates on odd things to the point where he can see nothing else. We talk for hours about how wind speeds are measured and why he believes the Egyptians deserve more credit for mathematical understanding than they are given. It isn’t . . . normal. We have kissed once, on our wedding day, we have held hands only twice, and he still flinches if I touch him unexpectedly. It is not how it should be.”
Sophie nodded, which gave Hazel hope that some part of this crazed explanation was actually making sense.
“My husband, Richard,” Sophie said, an unfamiliar softness in her voice, “believed that animals naturally understood Latin over any other language, and so we would be walking down the street and he would go over to a horse or a mule or even a cow and begin whispering Latin in their ears. I would try to block anyone’s view of him because it was completely addled. At night, he would wrap himself in three heavy quilts and sweat through them by morning. I would have to hang the quilts every day to dry them in time for him to sleep the next night wrapped up like a meat pie. And the smell . . .” She wrinkled her nose at the memory.
“Most of the women I knew tried to spend as little time with their husbands as possible, while I craved Richard’s company more than any other person. When Jason was born, I was almost sad at the time he would take away from Richard, isn’t that terrible?”