Page 20 of Rejected
When it is you who have destroyed mine.
Laurie swallowed.
“You can make it all right again,” he said through these plush, red lips. “With one word. One move.”
And that was when Josephine St. Claire, for the first time in her life, lost her nerve. She turned on her heel and ran away.
Like a coward.
Dear Beth,
I don’t know what heaven must be like. I have been trying to imagine it, for your sake. As someone with a vast, ‘too vast’, according to Aunt March, imagination, I tried to create in my mind a place worthy of you. I haven’t been able to yet.
When someone goes away, you send letters to them, and they send some back, and you try to picture them wherever they are. You imagine them in a glamorous ballroom, or sitting by a melancholy riverbank, taking long walks into the twilight, or cozily sitting in a parlor, talking to someone who isn’t you.
I have been trying to do the same since you left.
But as much as I try, I cannot imagine a heaven where you would be happier than you were in our home.
Eternally,
Your sister
eight
The minute she stepped foot back inside the ballroom, out of breath with terror and something else, something that felt dangerously like want, she was pounced upon by her sisters.
“Where have you been?” Margaret—oh, dash it, Meg—asked. “It’s time.”
“Time?” Jo repeated, dazed.
The crowd had thinned: everyone was leaving, finally. She had spent much more time with Laurie in the garden than she had realized. Outside the floor-length windows, the night had reached its darkest hour.
The realization crashed down on Jo like a mountain. It was time to say goodbye to her sisters.
…
They went back to Sir John’s residence.
It was a manor house in the fringes of town, surrounded by a garden large enough to give one the illusion of being in nature. Even so, Jo was acutely aware of how far from home she was.
She and her sisters sat in front of a blazing fireplace in the library, in their ballgowns, on the carpet, for one last time.
“Jo, you’ve ruined your lovely dress,” Amy sighed, taking the torn muslin between her elegant fingers. “You looked like a mermaid in it. So manymen admired you, not that you realized. Laurie looked like he was in pain.”
“Amy!” Meg said, affronted. “He did not! What a thing to say.”
Jo, still numb, could not utter a word.
“You know he did, Margaret,” Amy laughed. “We whispered for hours about it, you and I. We kept saying how he could not take his attention off our Josephine the whole night, poor boy. He looked like he was ready to duel every single man who laid eyes on her even or a second. Not that Jo would notice any of them, of course.”
Jo couldn’t breathe.
This needs to stop, now.
“Enough about that foolishness,” she said decisively.
Amy looked surprised at this: usually it was Jo herself who started all kinds of foolishness. But if Amy kept asking, or, even worse, if she discovered the further damage in Jo’s dress, she would find out what had happened with Laurie. And Jo was not ready to face that—not even by herself.
