“You of all people should have known it wasn’t me,” he said, so gently that I was ashamed. “Are you saying the reason you disappeared without a trace, without a word, is because I was famous?” A pause. “Have I understood that correctly?”
I hesitated. “Truthfully? It was more because of Sabina.”
“She told you to stay away? When? How did she find you?”
“No, no—I mean, I thought—” I stopped but made myself go on. “That in this world—” I stopped, closed my eyes, and opened them again; he was still looking baffled. “That in this world, you belonged together. I thought, you’d be happier. I felt, Sabina is so perfect. So blond. So . . . tall.” I stopped abruptly, because my breath had caught.
“So tall that you selflessly gave me up? Like for Lent, except forever?” Liam asked, a note of laughter in his voice. I shook my head, still unable to speak. “When you disappeared, I thought it was because you despised me. You’d seen who I really was. What was I to think?”
And I seemed to know all that would follow, as if I was looking down a corridor of hours and days and years leading back to this moment, which would in the end acquire the heft of legend. If we hadn’t happened into that churchyard, I’d say—the same day, the very hour—what would have become of us? And Liam would laugh. But we did. You were about to be rectified, I would protest. No, not without trying to talk to you first. Did you think I would give up like that, so easily? It will be a story to tell our grandchildren, we’d say, as people do, yet eventually this would be true, and we’d tell them.
But all that lay ahead; just then, I burst into tears.
“Wait. Do you mean that you—And Sabina. What about Sabina? Wait. Can this actually work? What are we going to do? How are we going to make this work?”
His arms were around me; he was kissing my wet face. “I don’t know, Rachel dear. We’ll think of something.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The very existence of this book means I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to many people, living and dead. Among them are Patrick O’Brian, Bill Mann, Jane Austen, Sam Stoloff, Terry Karten, Fanny Burney, Carol Schiller, Adelaide Nash, Sandra Adelstein, Michele Herman, Heather Aimee O’Neill, Lew Serviss, Julia Fierro, Ledra Horowitz, Joanna Karwowska, Czesia Mann, Steve Kenny, John Donne, Kathleen Furin, Mary Lannon, Jennifer Mascia, Judy Batalion, Virginia Woolf, Scott Sager, David Santos-Donaldson, Tauno Bilsted, Nicole Fix, Colter Jackson, Karen Barbarossa, Heather Lord, Danica Novgorodoff, Dina Strachan, Valerie Peterson, Hugon Karwowski, Perla Kacman, Charles Knittle, Geoff Marchant, Geoffrey Chaucer, Harry West, Brian Keener, Sally McDaniel, Catherine Panzner, Timea Szell, and, not least, Jarek Karwowski.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KATHLEEN A. FLYNN is an editor at the New York Times, where she works at “The Upshot.” She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College and a Master of Arts from the University of North Carolina. She has taught English in Hong Kong, washed dishes on Nantucket, and is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their shy fox terrier, Olive.
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