Emmy wanted to be with him. She wanted to feel as if she mattered.
As Mac entwined his body with hers, as close as two people could possibly be, Emmy suddenly understood why Mum had kept going back to Henry Thorne, even though he was married to someone else. It wasn’t just about the money he gave her to survive as a single mother. He made her feel wanted. Desired. Precious.
Mum had made an exchange, just like everyone does when quaking under a load that seems far too heavy. She exchanged a transparent life of abject poverty for one of secrets and illusion that kept her and her daughters fed and clothed. Julia had likewise exchanged the brides box for the fairy tale book when she didn’t want Emmy to leave. Emmy had exchanged Julia for her own aspirations when she didn’t want anyone else telling her what she could and couldn’t do.
And that very day Emmy had exchanged the absolution her father had willed to her for her own dignity.
This was how people balanced the scales their world was tipping, Emmy reasoned. It was only after time had passed that a person was able to see whether she might have been able to bear the load she was sure had been too heavy.
But life is lived at the moment you are living it, she thought. No one but God in heaven has the benefit of seeing beyond today.
In the morning when she awoke, Mac smiled at her in sleepy wakefulness and fingered a lock of hair away from her eyes.
“Good morning,” he said.
Emmy was afraid to rise from where she lay. Time seemed to have stilled and she didn’t want it to go about its relentless forward march. She didn’t know which girl she would be as she rose from the bed. She whispered her reluctance to leave.
“Stay, then.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Then marry me.”
He said it so swiftly. Emmy waited for him to laugh and assure her he was joking. Surely he was joking. But the seconds flitted by and he did not laugh.
“I’m crazy about you. Marry me, Isabel.”
Emmy stared at him openmouthed, not daring to imagine herself the happy wife of a good man. She was no friend of happiness. Mac had no idea whom he was proposing to.
“I’m not who you think I am,” Emmy whispered. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.
He kissed them away. “You’re the woman I love.”
“But you will leave when the war is over.”
“Everyone has to leave sometime, Isabel. Life is about coming and going. Come to America with me. I promise I will live every day to see that you don’t regret it.”
She closed her eyes to stop picturing herself pushing away from England, the only home she had ever known.
Pushing away from Julia, finally and fully.
“Isabel?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you love me?”
The moment the question was posed, she knew that she did. She did love him. But just because she loved him did not mean she was entitled to happiness with him, nor did it mean she had the courage to leave England and walk out on a promise she’d made to Mum years before on a sunny beach.
“What does it matter if I do?” Emmy said, rising from the bed and reaching for her clothes. Loving Mac changed nothing about who she was and what she had done.
“Isabel.”
She turned to him.
“Please don’t let the unhappiness you knew in the past keep you from accepting happiness now,” he said. “Please don’t.”
The pulling and twisting of her two identities—Emmeline’s past, Isabel’s future—was making her head spin. “I have to get back. Charlotte will be worried.”
“Isabel?”
“I—I can’t think about the future right now, Mac. Please don’t ask me to.”
He said no more about it. He said hardly anything as he walked her to the train station.
Emmy returned to Thistle House and made her apologies for having stayed overnight without letting Charlotte know. Then she told Charlotte what had happened at the lawyers’ office, and at the Thorne mansion.
She didn’t tell Charlotte she’d slept with Mac.
But Emmy thought Charlotte knew anyway.
Mac rang her twice in the weeks that followed, and Emmy kept the calls short, something she had not done before, not when it came to Mac. But his unanswered proposal hung between them like a gift she was too afraid to reach out and take. Her heart ached for Mac, but sleeping with him had been reckless and selfish.