"I'll always love you, Mary. Always," Jedediah said, holding her hand against his chest after she'd let it drop from his bearded cheek.
He looked at her intently, trying to commit this moment to memory she surmised—this room, the two of them alone for the last time, the way the light was painted across her pale face. She was not—she didn't want another memory, she wanted the present and the future and she couldn't have either. She flattened her palm against him, felt his heart beat, and nodded. But she didn't believe what he said.
The War had ended a month ago and the staff was finally disbanding. Mansion House was returning to Mr. Green's management, though Mary could not imagine it regaining its stature as a luxurious hotel; the years of suffering must have soaked into the very plaster. There had been nothing left to keep any of them, physicians, nurses, orderlies, in Alexandria any longer and so many had already left with the majority of the patients—the nuns like a flock of geese gone North, Charlotte Jenkins back to Boston with several freemen and women in tow, Matron back to Washington City to run a boarding house. Hale and McBurney had moved on with the Army to new posts and Nurse Hastings was soon to become Mrs. Byron Frederick Boethius Hale as she had crowed about for weeks on end. Samuel Diggs and Henry lingered to pack chests and help see to the last few men, too ill to move but unlikely to die, Isaac Watts always available for one last errand; Emma had come by a few times but not for very long, as out of place at the end as she had been the day she arrived, and she'd returned to her hoopskirts, lovely and aloof in thrice-turned silk dresses.
And Jedediah had come to Mary a week ago and confessed he'd booked tickets for California "I had no reason to delay further, I must go to her, you understand, don't you, Mary?" She had made an inarticulate gesture that meant "of course" and somehow found words to agree he must join his wife, even as she felt something irreparable within her tear, sharp and brutal. It was not his fault or hers, it was simply the case that she had fallen deeply in love, irretrievably, irrevocably in love with a married man. He loved her, she knew that, but she could not risk confiding in him the entirety of how she felt; the needle still tempted him too greatly and she would not let her affection or his guilt about leaving her be the lure to its promise of surcease. The best she could do for him was to let him go easily, even if her very soul cried out against it, a hopeless, hungry keening.
"God bless you, Jedediah," she said softly and it was enough for him to release her hand, to let it fall away from him, something that no longer belonged to him.
He moved, a rocking step as if he would take her in his arms, then turned and walked out the door. It closed behind him quietly but at least he did not carefully close it, wait until the lock had made its small snick to step away; he only let it shut of its own accord and she heard his tread in the hallway, steadily becoming further and further from her. Mary walked the few steps to her bed and sat down, not heavily, as if she might faint, but deliberately, trying to make a beginning. She didn't see how she could make something from nothing. She folded her hands in her lap as if she would pray but never had God seemed so distant..
"I'll always love you" he'd said; she listened to his voice in her mind, anguished, urgent, her passionate, brilliant Jedediah and she knew the truth, spoke it aloud in the lonely room,
"No, you won't."
He had a wife, however lacking she was, a home and a profession, and every connection he made to someone else secure him far beyond Mary's reach. His wife was still young enough to give him children, even if he thought it unlikely, and Mary knew he would be a most devoted father; he told her how they had hoped twice to be so blessed and been disappointed "so much that I never asked again, it was too hard for us both." Mary had seen her share of wives five, seven, ten years barren who gave birth to babies more doted upon than if they'd come just shy of the first anniversary. Even if there were no children, there would be a life, a full life with work and companionship, a lovely home and people eager to include him in their society. Jedediah would be far away and if somehow she could justify writing to him, she would not; she would not take away his chance to salvage something good from his life. She would have to find a way to accept her longing for him, this new grief she could never acknowledge; she curled herself around it and did not let herself lie down on the bed, would not let tears spill, or clench her fists around the folds of her skirt, bare of her apron, just an acreage of drab wool.
He would not always love her and she had to be glad of that, that he could find some peace in the life he had begun without her, when he closed the door; she could not understand what she had begun—it seemed like there was nothing new, her bitter sorrow for a man she'd lost redoubled, whatever dear dreams she'd allowed herself better forgotten than turned to knives in her hands, behind her eyes, no husband, no home, no small dark-eyed baby of her own, only work that needed someone's hand turned to it. It might as well be hers. She looked down at the palms of her hands, laid her bare left hand over her right and told herself there would never again be a ring there. Gustav's ring had been very simple, a thin gold band, unadorned with a gem or any chasing; that would not have done for Jedediah though he had never spoken of his Eliza's ring, only his paternal grandmother's with its cabochon sapphires and how the stones reminded him of August midnights overlooking the bay, how he'd believed her as a boy when she'd told him his grandfather had fished the jewels from the sky for her, "not the moon or the stars, the sky itself—I knew he could do it, no one could have doubted him, he was the master and I thought he sat right beside God in his Heaven."
She expected it would be like this; Jedediah was everywhere to her now even when he was no where at all, gone and she'd never see him again, never see that light in his eyes when he caught her gaze with his own, that smile he gave her, rueful, amused, tender. She had not meant to, it was a mistake, but she could not help crying and wrapped her arms around herself tightly, the only embrace left to her. There was a sound in the hallway but she couldn't make it out. Her ears were muffled with the hitching of her own breath. She tasted her own salt on her lips, not his last kiss. There was a quick rap at her door, she couldn't recognize whose it might be, and the barest pause for her response, one she couldn't make. Then her door opened. Had Jedediah come back or was it a friend looking in, or simply more work that she was needed for?
"Oh. Don't cry so-"
"It's you."