promise.”
“The flowers are lovely.” Greer surrenders a little smile. “My favorite color.”
“I know, Red, I remember.” He fixes her with his most alluring smile. And she is trapped, helpless, as he leans over the counter and kisses her so deeply that her cheeks glow, her heart swells and her womb begins to throb.
—
Alba lies across her bed, Albert’s pen in her hand, the yellow notebook open, trying to come up with something to write—fiction, not fact. But her mind is completely blank. And she keeps getting distracted, wondering if the private detective has made any discoveries yet. The pen is beautiful, which is something. Letters flow out of it, silky across the page, dark blue on white. But so far Alba has only three sentences. Crossed out.
Fireworks explode, scattering light like fistfuls of stars. Esme tucks her head under the pillow. Everyone is celebrating in the garden but she escaped hours ago.
Seeking inspiration, Alba glances up at her books, catching sight of Great Expectations snuggled between North and South and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Dickens was Dr. Skinner’s favorite author. With a sigh Alba thinks again of that day. The day everything fell apart.
She found out about Dr. Skinner’s betrayal while sitting in her favorite place on earth: a table underneath a south-facing window in the university library. There she could pretend she was alone in the world with only eight million books for company. A cast-iron radiator fixed to the wall toasted her ever-cold feet when she slipped her toes between its ridges.
It was Zoë who brought her the news. She snuck up behind Alba and tapped her gently on the shoulder. “Sorry,” she said when Alba flinched, “I didn’t want to disturb you, but I’ve just got something I thought you’d want to see.”
“Oh?” Alba closed Pitt and Peel: The Legacy of Youth on Victorian Britain and looked at the Journal of Modern History in Zoë’s hand: edition 8312.
“Your supervisor just published a paper. It’s brilliant.” Zoë nodded at Alba’s notebook. “You know, you must be the only one in here without a computer—”
“What? But the article—” Alba looked suddenly startled. “What’s the title?”
“‘Mona Caird and the Marriage Question in 1888: A Revisionist History.’”
“Really?” Alba wondered if Dr. Skinner had been meaning to surprise her with it. She took the journal and flicked through its pages until she found the title in bold and, underneath, the author’s name: Dr. A. Skinner.
One name. Alone. Single.
It must be a mistake. She stared at the black letters standing out against the white page, trying to suppress her rising panic. Perhaps this article was a precursor to the real one, perhaps Dr. Skinner had written it to prepare for their joint paper so that it would have the impact it deserved. Entirely forgetting Zoë, Alba began to read. Although she was an extremely fast reader with a nearly photographic memory, it took her two hours to read the article’s ten pages. Ten pages of what would now be known to the world—at least the world of academic historians—as Dr. Skinner’s brilliant revision of Victorian marriage mores in the late nineteenth century. It was a perfect, word-for-word account of her initial notes, crafted into elegant, brilliant paragraphs that followed every line of her reasoning exactly.
When she’d finished reading, Alba stayed at the desk, still holding the magazine, staring at the wall. Her world had turned on its axis, tipping so far that she could no longer see straight. And Alba sat there, until the library closed at ten o’clock and a concerned Zoë had to ask her to leave.
—
Carmen kneels in the dirt, carefully scooping out handfuls of soil with her fingers. Twilight sinks slowly into night, but the sky is still light enough for her to see by. Carmen wishes she’d never done it, wishes she had never brought it with her to England. It was a stupid mistake. And then it started to smell so strongly of Tiago, of sex and cigarettes, that it began to choke her. So Carmen tried to get rid of it, and burying it seemed the most sensible option. Though of course it hasn’t worked.
The midnight glory was the first plant Carmen saw when she came to the house. Its nearly black flowers reminded her of Tiago, how everything around him turned dark, so it had seemed appropriate. And she thought, once she buried the last piece of him, that she could get on with her life, that she could forget. But it’s just the opposite,