The Jane Austen Society(64)

He stepped up onto the porch until he was standing over her. “What were you and Adam talking about?”

“Excuse me?”

“On your walk home together—what were the two of you talking about?”

“I’m not discussing this with you . . .” she said in irritation, and went to open the door again, but he firmly turned her back round to face him.

“Fine.” She sighed impatiently. “We were talking about Jane Austen—what did you think we’d be talking about?”

“Are you in love with him?”

“You’re nuts, do you know that?” she exclaimed. “You practically let me get fired, you accuse me of being a drug addict, you do everything you can to push me away all these years. . . .”

“What do you mean, pushed you away all these years?”

“My God,” she muttered, “you even hired my archnemesis from college, a world-class spy . . .”

“Adeline, what on earth do you mean, pushed you away all these years?”

She dropped her head beneath his gaze to look down at her boots.

“I don’t understand. . . .” He sighed, looking up at the full moon and then down at the ground, too, his right hand across his brow.

“You don’t understand? Well, then, I must understand too much.”

“Adeline, please, just listen to me.” He tried to take her hand, but she would have none of it.

“Listen to what? Listen to how lonely you are, when both my own husband and baby have been dead and buried less than a year? What incredible timing for you!” Her voice was rising in anger with every word.

“Adeline, please, just let me in, so we can talk about this.”

“No, stop, you’re ridiculous—this is ridiculous—you have no right, do you hear me?” She turned the key in the lock, but her hands were shaking so hard she had to retry a few times to open it, all the while muttering, “You think you can finally wake up and just go and grab the first woman—the first young woman, I might add—who’s free? Just because you’re looking for someone—for some thing—to get you through the night? How dare you! How dare you presume that about me, of all people!”

She pushed the front door open and held it back against his reach.

“Adeline, I did not presume—I don’t presume—anything. Surely you know that about me by now.”

“Please go,” she begged, tears starting to stream down her face. “Can’t you see how much you’re hurting me?”

She slammed the door in his face, leaving him standing there alone in the darkness, listening to the sound of her sobbing from the inside. He couldn’t have made things worse if he’d tried. He would be lucky if Adeline ever even spoke to him again, when he had come there tonight with completely opposite plans, fuelled by consuming jealousy over Adam Berwick and his little gifts to the ladies.

He waited for a few minutes until he heard her crying finally subside, then he marched down the garden path without looking back at the small house behind him, none of its lights on yet. This left him walking in near darkness except for the moon. He felt as lonely as it was possible at that moment, with no one to guide him but that impersonal terrestrial orb high up in the sky, glowing for everyone and for no one at all. There was no one else watching over him, no one who cared about his well-being. He had been cheated of that years ago, and then the universe in its infinite unfairness had made a one-sided bargain with him: go back for more pain or get nothing in return.

So now here he was, with nothing in return. Except that he had also managed to get hurt all over again in the process, which took some doing by his count.

When he entered his own darkened house, the first thing he saw in the moonlight was the ring of keys to the medicine cabinet dangling just inside his office door. He could make himself feel better, so easily, and no one would ever know. But somehow Adeline would know—or, at least, he would move one step closer to the ridiculous mess she had just accused him of being, and he wasn’t sure he could stand any further sinking in her own eyes or his.

Feeling this bad about himself usually had the opposite effect, usually made him cave in to the pain and the addiction. But after tonight, in a way, he had both nothing left to lose and everything to gain. He wasn’t going to move one iota closer to what he wanted if he gave in now. Because if he submitted yet again, he would be continuing on the path he had set for himself several years ago, and that path had led up a garden and right bang into a locked front door, and it would keep doing so, in different ways, with different people, if he was even lucky enough to get another chance at any of that.

He wasn’t living in his life, because his life was pain. He was living outside his real life instead, and he was using the drugs to help him do that. He had stayed away from the cabinet for several weeks now, ever since his vow to himself in the little church graveyard on Christmas Eve—hiring Liberty Pascal (that “world-class spy,” Adeline had just called her, and he couldn’t help but grin right now at her words, despite his distress) had been a huge help in that regard, as the young woman missed nothing. He had been trying to make himself a better man, and right now the reason for that seemed to be slipping away, but that was the trap, after all. If he could resist the temptation at a time like this, when he had nothing left to hope for, then he could always resist it. It was a large cosmic test, and God knows he had failed so many of those before. But although Adeline might no longer be a reason for him to pass, she had conquered her own temptations in her darkest hour, and he would learn any lesson he could from her. She was still the smartest person he knew, and her rejection of him at this moment spoke to that, as much as it surely pained him to admit.