This is a M-rated epilogue to Second Chances.
"It was a silent, but very powerful Dialogue between them." Persuasion, the alternative ending.
"That...was tremendous."
Patrick collected Shelagh's still shaking and sweaty body tenderly into his arms. "Yesssss." His voice was a deep growl, filled with raw emotion.
He cradled and rocked her there silently for some minutes.
"The Spirit touched the earth and it moved. I felt it. My magnanimous wife."
"Patrick, you do not need to speak religious expressions to me. I love you all the same."
"I know. But what if I wish to?"
"Why didn't you speak to me about your wife? Not in your letters. Not in any way."
"I know now that I should have. It was too complicated to write about. I thought I'd ask you to meet my sister Jane and hear some parts from her. But then I thought that might seem preposterous. Like you had a duty to hear my story."
"I would have listened. Oh, I would have liked to have heard it. That seems one lost opportunity." There was a pining in her voice. It pierced Patrick's soul.
"You see..." He had a lump in his throat. "I had experienced Peggy fleeing from me to her illness. Sometimes she was there, although not for me anymore. The divorce had made our relationship dry and non-existent. There was for both of us a conscious effort to keep distance...because we were ashamed. She was ashamed of exposing herself to me in her manic acts. In her clearer days, she felt a remorse of the...humiliation I had suffered."
"You mean her...lover."
"If you can call him that. I don't know what to say about it. But I was ashamed of other things, too. For not seeing early enough how ill she was. She was such a sweet girl when I first met her. I was a doctor and could not see my wife descend into a medical crisis. Not that it would really have helped her. There is no effective treatment. But I felt I should have been more understanding, more constant-—she was hurting herself more than me. There was a question of pride: I believe in science and in reasonable order. This illness was too much to me, a medical man. It was odd to be so vulnerable."
"Did I make you feel vulnerable?"
A pause. "Yes, you did. Although the time we met, I was not living my vulnerable but my proud, defensive phase. It felt odd that you would choose...Jesus and the life of a nun. It seemed like having a lightning strike twice. I am not superstitious, but it made me...think myself a bit cursed."
"I wasn't using you when I expressed a preference to...your company."
"Or when you expressed a preference to having me to hold you..." he quipped lovingly, "do not forget that." A pause. "What were you doing then? This is an earnest question. I'd like to know."
"Patrick, I needed you holding me. A human touch. A man's touch. I was at crossroads and I had very little means or courage to...ask or say anything."
There was a pregnant pause. An angel flew by.
"I also had very little experience...with men."
He kissed her hair. "I should have...understood that. Forgive me."
"You are forgiven. It seems now more shocking because of the order of the events. My boldness and losing my boldness in such a rapid sequence. One day it was there, then it wasn't."
"I could see that you had used all your powers of courage that night. That is why I didn't press you to speak to me, and tried to leave you some room, if you so wished. I was magnanimous then."
He sighed. "But you see, the greatest humiliation with Peggy was that she didn't need me anymore. You perhaps didn't need me more than for one night—I was a bit priggish. After all, can you give a man a harder run than...how would I say this..."
"Persuading a nun to leave the veil for you? A competition with Jesus?"
"Yes, all that. Your family, your ideas of war, your intelligence...even your beauty scared me."
Shelagh gave a melancholy snort.
"Then that distance, however, seemed not a good solution, not from North Africa. I could not write to you the stuff that was needed."
"I could not read your letters. I was afraid of what might happen if I did. I was in-between worlds there, and the war made me shortsighted. The only thing that my courage finally suited was stealing your letters from Mother Jesu Emanuel. I think it was, in the end, a good thing to read them."
"I am proud! My pretty little thief!" he chuckled. "But it took a long time before you read them."
"I had to be ready to accept whatever there was in those letters and that I had perhaps ruined the chance of - there ever being us. I could understand your resentment and helplessness. Yet, for me, it would have been easier if you had, even with difficulties, told about your wife and her illness."
"Yes. But I did not know you then. I loved you, but I did not know how an upper-class girl like you, a professional medic, a nun, would take such a thing. That was my weakness. Not trusting you."
"My weakness was...taking false advice. Bending under the circumstances."
"Do you think Sister Julienne's advice to you was false? I think so, but I am biased."
"It was perhaps one of those times when the value of an advice will be confirmed only by the following events. I myself would not give such advice to a young woman now. Sister Julienne also showed her remorse of that advice by giving me a second chance to study again. She was a wise, lovely woman, she could learn new tricks even in her old days."
Patrick let out a positive grunt. "I may have to forgive her, posthumously."
After a moment, he turned to her, cupped her face and drew it close to him.
"Talking of learning new tricks..."
"Behave yourself, mister! Do you mean I am in my old days?!"
"No." He had found the touch of her mouth, the tip of her tongue, he let his lips wander on her cheeks, he kissed her jaw, he studied the soft skin in her neck. She had started to shudder under this siege. "I mean my old days."
"You are forgiven, sir."
"Sir. How respectful. I will want to try to make you express your...respect... in a more enthusiastic manner."
"How about if I shriek My Lord and My Master?"
"Blasphemous. Utterly blasphemous. Just the way I like it."
"Please, just let the earth shake, then."
"I will, madam."