I blinked. “Sorry. My brain is all …” I waved a hand around my head.
She smiled. “I was a bit foggy in the early parts of both of my pregnancies, so I can relate to the …” She did some hand waving of her own. “One evening, I found myself quite parched, and when I started pouring water out of our pitcher, I realized—too late, mind you—that I was pouring it onto a dinner plate, rather than into a cup.”
I laughed.
“What were you thinking about?” she asked. “Anything you want to talk through?”
Sinking into the chair opposite her desk, I let the thread of that thought snowball for a moment before I answered. “I was thinking about what Charlotte said about conventionality. How the definition of normal or right changes with every generation. Look at me, for example. In their time, I would’ve been absolutely ruined if I’d found myself in this position. I would’ve been forced to marry the man who ruined me, no matter the circumstances that led to it. And if I hadn’t married him, I—and by extension, my family—would have been ruined in polite society. No choices would’ve been offered to me.”
“True.” Atwood sighed, a soft smile on her face. “And what made you think about that?”
I shrugged. “Everything, I guess. Even now, people would say the way we’re doing things, the father and I, isn’t conventional. They’d equate that to right or wrong. Similarly, how many people thought the Bront? sisters were wrong for writing their books? They had to publish them under male pseudonyms to even have a shot at making money from what they did. Society would judge them, define them, and cast them into a set category because their choices defied convention.”
“And you worry that people will define you because of your choices?”
“No.” I shifted in the chair. “Or I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. We don’t wear our choices like a scarlet letter. People only know my choices if I choose to share them.”
She hummed. In front of her was the same navy-blue teacup that she always drank out of, and she paused to take a sip. “That’s quite true.”
“We don’t need to talk about it.” My fingers, knit tightly together in my lap, covered the small bump underneath my black sweater, and I saw her eyes drift there. “Really. I just … I do that sometimes. Anytime I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, or should be doing, I think about them. About the sisters. And how few choices they had, simply because of when they were born, you know?”
As I spoke, I fought a feeling of defensiveness when no one had even called for a discussion on my choices. Professor Atwood removed her glasses and set them on the surface of her desk.
“Lia, I know we need to discuss your first draft—and we shall—but for a moment, would you allow an old lady to give a piece of advice?”
I gave her a look. She wasn’t a day over forty-five. Old, my ass. “You’re not old, but yes.”
She smiled. “It’s natural in this field to fixate quite strongly on the past. We’re paid to do so, aren’t we?”
Slowly, I nodded, not entirely sure where she was going with this.
“I know that you’re still sussing out what you’d like to do with your degree once you finish, but no matter what you decide, I’d give you one word of caution.” She turned the edge of her teacup to line it up with the edge of her desk, and when the angle was right, she glanced back up at me. “Be careful that you don’t anchor your thoughts so firmly on the past that it’s hard for you to deal with your future, especially if part of that future is unclear.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.” But my fingers tightened over my belly, my chest felt a little tight at the gentle delivery of her words. “Isn’t it a good sign that I think of them often? That I’m constantly trying to correlate our societal dilemmas with what they went through?”
“Of course that’s good.”
“Then why do I feel like you’re chastising me?” Oh, my gawd, were my eyes getting blurry? Was I crying in her office?
“Lia,” she said gently, “I’m not chastising you. But I do see in you something that I used to struggle with myself, and I don’t want you to only plant your thoughts on the past when you should be able to look straight to your future.”
My future. My future was one giant foggy question mark.
And there was time to wave those clouds away.
I stood, and I saw the regret in her eyes. “I have to go,” I told her.
“We still need to talk about your draft.” Her chin lifted. “I apologize if I overstepped.”
“I, uh, I can email you about your openings next week.” I slid my backpack straps over my shoulders. “Besides, I have a doctor’s appointment in London.”
In three hours, but she hardly needed to know that.
She raised her eyebrows. “You’re going to London for that? They couldn’t get you into a doctor here?”
Atwood still had no idea who the father was, and explaining that he paid for the friggin’ fanciest doctor in the universe to stick a gel-covered wand up my hoo-hah did not sound like a fun time, given what she’d just said to me.
“Yeah, it’s a long story.” I tucked my hair behind my ear. “Thank you for your advice.”
She smiled gently. “I hope your appointment goes well.”
She knew, probably just as well I did, that we were both being fake AF with our polite goodbyes. I wasn’t feeling all that thankful over what she said. I felt attacked. I felt?… vulnerable.
The Tube ride to London felt too long.
And it felt too short.
Jude was meeting me at the doctor’s office for this appointment because we were going to try to listen for the heartbeat, and for some reason, it was the first time in a long time when I didn’t know if I wanted to face him.
If I was fixating on the past to avoid my own future, wouldn’t I be doing that with my own past? I had a laundry list of items to choose from, if that were the case.
-Father dying when I was young: check.
-Mother bailing when it wasn’t so super fun to be a parent anymore: check.
-Brother becoming Dad, which made for a very confusing family tree when we had school assignments: check.
But none of those were even remotely things I wanted to fixate on. Because they were done. Over. Nothing about them could be changed.
I got off, minded the gap and all that jazz, and let the ebb and flow of the crowd leaving the station guide me up onto the street. The trees were devoid of leaves by this point in the fall, and it felt appropriately barren.
There was no lush, pretty scenery to distract me from what Atwood said, and even the grandeur of the buildings didn’t adequately hold my attention.
Always looking for a distraction.
The thought drew me up short, only a block away from the doctor.
Were Jude and I both guilty of what she’d said?
I rubbed my belly, wondering if the little strawberry could sense my unease. “Sorry, lil fruit,” I murmured. “I’ll try to slow the mental anguish.”
Rounding the corner, I spied Jude’s tall form against one of the white colonial columns propping up the ornate entryway to the office. He was wearing a black knit hat and aviator glasses that covered half his face. All that was visible was his dark scruff along his jaw and the stern line of his mouth.
Maybe what we were doing was a distraction and nothing more, this refusal to address what was waiting for us, but when he looked up and saw me, I could not help the way I reacted to that slow, sensual curve of his mouth.
I knew what that mouth was capable of.
“Hello,” he murmured, sliding a hand over my hip when I approached. Quite naturally, my hands slid up the marble-hard planes of his chest, and I lifted my chin. He took the hint, smart boy that he was. Jude gave me a soft kiss but didn’t deepen it. “Good meeting with your advisor?”
A buzzing sound went off in my head, like a game show contestant had hit the wrong button.
Not the topic I wanted to touch on.
“Fine,” I told him. “You’re early.”
He grinned. “I wanted to scope out the building and see if you were exaggerating about how posh it was.”
Lifting one eyebrow, I pinched his nipple, smiling in satisfaction when he yelped.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.