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  “I do love you, Gregor Rostov,” she promised me.

  I didn’t doubt her. She loved Gregor Rostov, no question. But what about me? Did she love me? And if so, did she love me enough?

  Cozying up to your anxieties gets you nowhere, so I opted for wallowing in the gladness, which, if temporary, was at least present. “When?” I asked her. “Since when?”

  “Since the first, maybe. But that could be hindsight. Certainly since the second or third. It wasn’t that I didn’t know,” she explained, “but I thought there was nothing I could do. I thought it was just one of those things that was too bad. True, and too bad, but I would go on with my life.”

  “From the first?”

  “You looked so…”

  Eligible, was my most cynical expectation. Handsome, maybe, attractive, exciting, mysterious.

  “…as if you were looking for a friend. And you talked to me. We talked.”

  “I roused your maternal instincts?”

  “Not maternal. Don’t play dumb. What about you?”

  “What about me what?”

  “When did you?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “In Pittsburgh,” I said. “When we…“ There was no word adequate to that occasion; the word hasn’t yet been written that incorporates the physical, emotional, and metaphysical. The first two, maybe, but nothing touches on the metaphysical aspect of sex, and unless it does, it doesn’t do the job. “In Pittsburgh. Before, I knew how much I liked you, but I didn’t know I loved you.”

  “And they say women are hopeless romantics.”

  “Who says? It’s men who say that, in their canons of literature, men and the male critics who explicate them. What do they know?”

  By the time we stopped to eat hamburgers just east of Harrisburg, we were both too deeply immersed in a discussion of the place of women in the arts to worry about who paid for lunch or for gas. Alexis drove the last long section of the Turnpike. I directed her to get off at the Perry Valley exit and then go south on Route 19. She looked at the fast-food restaurants, gas stations, motels, and malls crowding around the stoplighted intersections, obscuring the long summer twilight. “What’s going to happen now? I don’t want to spend the night alone in some sleazy motel,” she told me, apologizing.

  “What about with me? With me in some sleazy motel?”

  “That would be OK. If your family—if your parents—I can stay in Pittsburgh, I’d be all right alone where we stayed before.”

  “We’ll see how it goes,” I told her. “Here, turn here, onto seventy-nine. It’s only a few miles, maybe ten.” Seventy-nine had been built since my time, but I’d looked at the map and knew which exit we wanted. Once we were off seventy-nine, the back roads were familiar but Alexis drove them warily, as they wound up and around the hills of western Pennsylvania. The gateway we turned at surprised her—I was watching her face—and the long driveway climbing up the slope of the hill, the respectably aged trees and the well-tended green lawns. I could hear her mind ticking over, making connections, drawing conclusions. My mind had ceased functioning. I could only hope.

  The driveway branched before it circled to the front entrance of the house, and I directed her around the west wing to the garage. We got out of the car into the hot, sullen air July brings to the Ohio River Valley. “Muggy, isn’t it?” I remarked.

  “I guess your parents work here,” Alexis said, looking up at the house. “That makes sense. I’d just…expected something different, some context in which I had no experience. Something entirely unknown. It’s going to be harder than I thought, Gregor. What did they do with four children? Your parents.”

  “It’s a pretty big place,” I told her.

  I led her up flagstone steps to a broad patio that ran all along the back of the house. Some of the French doors stood open to the cooler evening air. Below the stone balustrade, grassy lawns fell away. A golden evening was just changing into purple twilight, and in the east wing dining room I could see a table set with candles. I went over to the balustrade and looked down to where the swimming pool, like a giant aquamarine, was partially visible. “If my guess is correct, they’ll be—” I managed to say, before my throat closed up on me.

  Two people sat at the poolside, dressed for dinner, suit and silk.

  “I don’t see them.” She looked down at the seated couple, and the pool, poolhouse, gardens beyond. “Where—”

  And then she saw it.

  “What is your name. Really.”

  I took a breath. “Reikel. Gregory. Allen. Gregory Allen Reikel don’t run away, Alexis.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Don’t turn away,” I specified.

  She turned back to face me.

  “You lied to me.”

  “I never lied to you.”

  “A fake. Reikel Mining. I’m a stockholder.”

  “Will you let me explain?”

  She wasn’t interested in any explanation. “An important stockholder. You deliberately deceived me. What was it, some kind of test?”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t dare reach for her hand. I didn’t dare give her the chance for a definitive gesture. “But who was I testing?”

  She was too intelligent not to see it. “But it was terrible, it is, what you’ve done to me, Gregor. Gregory.”

  “Any more terrible that what you did to me? No”—I put my hands up to ward off her response—“that’s no argument. It was terrible, I can’t deny, I won’t deny it.”

  I would have liked to, to argue that since it brought us to love, everything had to be right. But everything had changed between us now. Always before, I’d known more than she had, about love, about myself—even about what she knew. Now things were equal, we stood equal, and it was up to her.

  “You really played me for a fool.” But the sharp, dismissive anger was gone from her voice.

  “Just listen. Please. When I left home I was eighteen—eighteen, Alexis, that’s so young. I don’t have to tell you what my life was like, you’ve lived it. I was idealistic and…it made me angry, I don’t know how to explain. Alexis? Listen. Remember the girl I told you about?”

  “She got pregnant.”

  “I loved her. I thought we were the great love story of the Western world. And who knows? Maybe we would have been. But my father—he offered her money, for an abortion, a settlement too. He went to her house and offered it, and she took it. It wasn’t even very much money, but she thought it was. For me, a price for me.”

  “Oh,” Alexis said.

  “I wanted to marry her. She knew I did, we’d talked about it. I could have supported us without any help from my family and she knew that too, but she took the money.”

  “Oh,” Alexis said.

  “So I left home. I was angry.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “I wasn’t in any mood to compromise, and they…they’d been knocked pretty hard, between Lisa—my sister—and me. They let me go. I think, they thought I’d be right back, probably. My father said I was trying to live in some fairy-tale world.”

  What had seemed so right, what had seemed my only chance—I didn’t know how to make Alexis see it. “They didn’t think I really would, or could. It was like a dare—or a sneer. I was young. Remember eighteen?”

  “So you did it to show them? Is that what I’m for?”

  “To show me, Alexis. You’re for me.”

  The house, silver in twilight, the candlelit table, the shining jewel of a pool: she looked around at all of them, and I was afraid of what she was thinking. But I had no idea what she was thinking. “My God, you’ve got courage,” she said.

  I didn’t dare to interrupt her.

  “And so do I, don’t I?” she said, as if she hadn’t known it. “All right,” she said.

  “I did lie to you. I meant you to misunderstand.”

  “I know,” she said. “Just tell me one thing, Gregory Reikel,” trying on the name.
“Do you have any more surprises for me? Any more of these metamorphoses? These earthquake occasions?”

  “Surprises, I hope. But nothing more like this. This is it. This is me.”

  “Your parents won’t like it, my being married.”

  “They’ll get entirely the wrong idea about you,” I agreed.

  “Mine, on the other hand—”

  “Does that mean you will? Marry me? And—?”

  “How can you even ask?”

  I lost my cool, my dignity, composure, self-control, lost all pretense. “Just answer, please, just say yes. I know, but say it to me, to me myself.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I moved along the patio, to the broad steps that led down. She came with me, without any hesitation. Then she laughed out loud, setting her foot on the last step. “That’s quite some trust I’ll be managing. Gregory. Allen. Reikel.” And she laughed again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what’s mine is yours, as we agreed.”

  I nodded. I remembered.

  “And what’s yours is mine, as we agreed.”

  I nodded again, dumb with surprise.

  “Which makes a tidy sum,” she concluded.

  I could have protested, but I’d have felt like a fool trying it. I’d agreed to equality, and reality. I’d even known they might be troubling, but I’d thought Alexis was the only one who’d be troubled by them. I had to laugh. “I like your attitude. ‘Tidy sum’ sounds much better than ‘filthy rich.’”

  “Half of our combined incomes will make a substantial foundation.”

  “Or a third,” I suggested. “After taxes. Whatever, it’ll keep you busy. Exercise your leadership abilities. Exercise your financial skills. You can work at home,” I said, reaching out for her hand, “and not have to leave the children.”

  She clutched at my fingers. “What about children? We haven’t talked about anything important yet, Gregor. Gregory. Children, and where do we live, and what you’ll do—because you can’t not work—and—”

  “There’s time,” I told her. “We have plenty of time now.”

  She stopped dead. She dropped my hand and turned to face me, but standing back, away. Her eyes were cast down. “Gregory?”

  Her voice was so little I could barely hear it. I couldn’t answer her right away, however, because the last sunlight was brushing her skin and hair with golden shadows, and my breath was caught in my throat.

  “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  When she raised her face, to make herself say it, her eyes glistened. I had seen them glistening like that once before, the last time we made love. When we both knew it was the last time.

  “Don’t,” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I have to. I’m ashamed, but I ought to tell you.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s all right.”

  She shook her head again. “I’m relieved,” she said, unsmiling. “I mean I’m”—her eyes glistened—“really relieved. Because I was afraid. Afraid for myself, not even for the two of us, only myself. And I’m so glad you’re not—I’m so glad you’re—” She couldn’t finish. “I’m sorry, Gregory,” she said, “I’ve lied all along, to myself, but you too. Didn’t you ever wonder about that weekend? I did. After. I think I would have made up anything to get you in bed and I wouldn’t even admit it to myself. How much does this change things for you?”

  Women, I thought. What kind of perfection do they expect from themselves? And I said just that to her.

  For a minute, I was afraid she was going to argue the question, but “I hope so,” was all she answered.

  I didn’t know what she was thinking. I wondered what she was thinking.

  “I should have known, shouldn’t I?” she asked, as we moved along the gravel path. She was asking herself, not me, but I answered her anyway.

  “Maybe you did. Maybe you saw right through me.”

  “We could believe that,” she suggested.

  “We could believe that,” I agreed.

  I let go of her hand and put my arm around her shoulders. Her arm went around me. We moved along the path in step, with her bare, round-boned shoulder under my hand and her fingers up under my suit jacket, her fingertips at my waist. The man saw us first. I watched him rise from his chair, with more hope than apprehension, or so it seemed to me. Perhaps because that’s what I myself was feeling.

  Also by Cynthia Voigt

  Adult:

  By Any Name

  Young Readers:

  Teddy & Co

  Building Blocks

  Izzy, Willy-Nilly

  David and Jonathan

  When She Hollers

  The Callender Papers

  Tree by Leaf

  The Vandemark Mummy

  Orfe

  Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers

  The Mister Max books:

  The Book of Lost Things

  The Book of Secrets

  The Book of Kings

  The Rosie books:

  Stories about Rosie

  The Rosie Stories

  The Tillerman books:

  Homecoming

  Dicey’s Song

  A Solitary Blue

  The Runner

  Come a Stranger

  Sons from Afar

  Seventeen Against the Dealer

  The Bad Girls books:

  Bad Girls

  Bad, Badder, Baddest

  It’s Not Easy Being Bad

  Bad Girls in Love

  Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Watcha Gonna Do?

  The Davis Farm books:

  Angus and Sadie

  Young Freddie

  The Kingdom books:

  The Tale of Gwyn (previously published as Jackaroo)

  The Tale of Birle (previously published as On Fortune’s Wheel)

  The Tale of Oriel (previously published as The Wings of a Falcon)

  The Tale of Elske (previously published as Elske)

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