A/N: I do not own Persuasion. I do, however, adore reviews.

Chapter Five: Alex Interrupts Again

"Mostly, we have manufactured ladies -- with the exception of Ingrid, Grace, Deborah and Audrey."

-Cary Grant

Two days before we left for Chicago, I found myself in an interesting conversation with Gretchen and Marietta. I had gone over to their parents' house after a long week at the hospital, looking for some peace and quiet. I shouldn't have looked there. Anna had just left the house before my arrival and all the two girls wanted to do was talk about her. Apparently, they felt sorry for her because she was single and they wanted to find her a boyfriend. "She needs someone who is really smart," Marietta said.

"And good-looking," Gretchen added. "She needs to marry a gorgeous man."

"But you're always saying how average her looks are," her sister remarked.

"I know, but she's so sweet and nice that she deserves an amazingly handsome man. She is just average; she's not that pretty."

"She's prettier than Maya and Liz," was her sister's sharp retort.

I just sat there listening. Contrary to anything I might have said, I thought Anna was gorgeous. Her brilliant green eyes were still fascinating, even if some of the light had gone out of them. She was sadder than I'd ever seen her before. We'd been together for a year and a half back in college. And in those eighteen months, I'd never seen her look like she was about to cry for more than an hour. But for the past month and a half, I'd seen that sadness brimming to the point of tears every time I'd seen her. And I'd tried to ignore that sadness but making out with Gretchen. But that medicine does not cure the disease; it only puts it off until a later date. Gretchen is beautiful; there is no denying that. But I've learned that all that's inside her head is a lot of fluffy pink cotton candy. Try as I might to find the deeper meaning inside of her, Gretchen would never be a match for me. But I can't give Anna the satisfaction of knowing that. I can't let her know that the girl I'm using to get over her doesn't satisfy me in any way, especially intellectually. I realized that there is a difference between a pediatric neurologist and a socialite.

"We really wanted Kevin to marry Anna," Gretchen said. "They made such a good couple. But then Maya had to come along and ruin everything. And now he's married to the money-grubber. And Anna is still alone."

"When were Kevin and Anna ever likely to marry each other?" I asked.

"Years ago, it was back when they both first graduated from college. They dated for a while and things really looked like they were headed towards marriage," Marietta said quickly. Then she saw something on the couch. "Oh, look Gretchen; Anna forgot her crocheting. We should call her and give it back to her."

Marietta picked up a partially-finished pale blue blanket and smiled as Gretchen exclaimed, "It's so pretty. We have to get it back to her so she can finish it."

"What is it?" I asked.

"It's a baby blanket," Gretchen said. "Anna's good friend from school, Natalie Palmer is expecting her first baby in September. They're having a boy and because Anna and Natalie are so close, Anna is making the baby a blanket and a few other odds and ends."

"She makes amazing baby blankets," Marietta added. "She made blankets for both Josh and Tony. They're so beautiful; she did theirs in blues and greens and yellows. This one for Natalie's baby will be blue and white because those are the colors Natalie and Mike are decorating the baby's nursery in."

"I wish Natalie and Mike weren't in Ohio this summer," her younger sister exclaimed. "Anna is so much happier when she has friends around instead of just being bullied around by Maya and the rest of the Eliot family."

"Natalie and Mike Palmer are both teachers," the older sister explained. "Natalie's family is from Columbus, Ohio and her sister, Melissa, is getting married this summer, so Natalie and Mike headed back home for the summer to help out with things."

"Maybe while we're in Chicago, Anna can go over to Columbus for a few days to see Natalie."

"How would she get there?" I asked.

"I don't know," Gretchen said off-handedly, reminding me of just how ditzy she could be. "But it would be nice of Anna to see Natalie. She hasn't seen any of her friends all summer. All she's been doing is baby-sitting Maya and her children. It would be good for her to see someone who makes her happy."

"Her family just kicks her around like she's a dog or something," Marietta added. "But people like Natalie actually treat her like a real person. It drives my mother crazy. She loves Anna like a daughter and she's sick of the way Wally, Liz, and Maya treat her. It's like they don't care about her at all."

All this talk about Anna's hard life and her friend was interesting. I remember Anna crocheting a lot when we were dating. But I was still wondering what had happened between Kevin and Anna in the past eight years. How could a guy get really close to marrying a girl and then turn around and marry her sister? "Hold on a second," I said, holding up a hand. "I have a question and it has nothing to do with crocheting or babies or Anna's friend Natalie."

Both girls just stopped talking and stared at me. "What?" Marietta said.

"So, you mentioned that Kevin dated Anna before he married Maya. What the heck happened there?"

"You explain," Gretchen told her sister quickly. "It's a weird story."

Marietta sighed. "Okay, so basically, Kevin met the whole Eliot family about six or seven years ago at a benefit Wally hosted to raise money to fund ovarian cancer research. It's a pretty big event, happens every year and Wally always hosts it. My grandma Musgrove died from ovarian cancer the year before, so my dad had made a pretty sizeable donation to the charity and our whole family was invited to the benefit. While there, Kevin met the Eliot family and he immediately hit it off with Anna. They got to be friends really quickly. And we all thought they were dating for a long time before they actually started dating. She says they only went on three dates, but it's hard to say. They were the kind of friends that evolved into dating. But I think they went on more than three dates."

"They were so great together," Gretchen sighed. "They were cute together and they understood each other."

"And then Anna spent the summer in Ohio working on her master's degree. While she was gone, Maya managed to convince Kevin that Anna wasn't interested in him at all and that they should get together. After a couple months of this and not much contact with Anna, Kevin started dating Maya. So when Anna got home at the end of August to start working at the school where she works now, she found out that her sister was dating Kevin. And they were engaged by Christmas. Then they got married when Kevin was twenty-three and Maya was twenty-one. She graduated from college a year later right before Josh was born."

"And Anna hasn't dated anybody seriously since then," Gretchen added to conclude her sister's story.

"That sucks," I said. "That really just sucks for Anna."

"It really does," Marietta replied. I was starting to discover that Marietta could be far more compassionate and caring than her sister.

"But it's not like she couldn't get a boyfriend if she tried," Gretchen inserted.

As I watched her older sister roll her eyes, I realized something. The Musgrove sisters were not as close as everyone, including Gretchen, thought they were. The Gretchen genuinely annoyed her older sister. I'd seen Marietta roll her eyes at her sister numerous times. And I was starting to realize that Marietta did not like her sister as much as her sister liked her. That said Marie seemed to love her little sister, Eva. I could understand her frustration with Gretchen, especially when Marietta seemed to be smarter and more aware of the world around her than Gretchen. Gretchen, as I just said, had a head full of cotton candy, the names of people in her social scene, the movies that she wanted to see over the next week, and other frivolous tidbits that might see her through the next month or so of living off of her parents but wouldn't get her through life in the real world. In short, I was looking for a wife and there was no why Gretchen was ready to be anyone's wife, least of all my wife. I was going to be a pediatric neurosurgeon at Children's Hospital and while I could afford to have a trophy wife, I couldn't afford to be married to a complete airhead. According something Anna once said many years ago, you couldn't afford to be married to an airhead until you were on wife number three. Based on Anna's years in Hollywood, she had formulated a theory about how to marry if you wanted to be wealthy and famous. You married your first wife for money, your second wife was for power, and your third was for pleasure.

If that was true, then I needed to find a rich woman who could keep me happy and give me two adorably blonde children. But that wasn't what I wanted to do. For one thing with my Greek background, I wasn't sure I could have blonde children. And for another, I'd grown up in a family with two parents who loved each other and their children. I wanted a family like that. I wanted to marry a woman I loved and have a big family filled with love. I really did want to be a pediatric neurologist, but I also wanted the pleasure of being called "Daddy." Seeing Josh and Tony had really given me a desire to have the kind of moments that Anna had with her nephews and that Kevin had with his sons. The night when we'd watched Braveheart had been great. Tony was such a sweet little guy and he'd held my hand for a while before falling asleep in Anna's arms. I could never have that future with Anna because of the way she'd rejected me. There were nights when I found myself dreaming of an alternate universe in which Anna and I could actually make things work. But then I woke up in the reality that we could never make things work. It was a world where she was too close to her family to ever give me a chance, a world where a deathbed promise to her mother took precedence over her needs and desires. I had watched her do this when we were dating years ago and now, I was watching her throw her health and life away to help people who didn't give a rat's ass about her. And that was probably what bugged me the most. She had friends, she had a job, but these people still expected her to make them the center of her universe even though they never did the same for her. While I was still angry at her for the way she had treated me, it was hard for me to see people treat her like this. I think there is a part of me that will always want to protect her. I'm not saying that I'll always love her but I think I'll always feel an attachment to her. She was the first girl I ever really loved and she was also the first person to break my heart. And that definitely gives us some bizarre connection to each other. That might sound weird but I think it's true. I think that you will always have a connection to the first person who broke your heart.


Later that day, while I was still at the Musgroves' house, Anna came over with Josh and Tony. "Kevin and Maya have some work party thing tonight," she explained to Gretchen. "So I'm taking the boys to the park to play for a while but I wanted to pick up my crocheting before I left. I need something to do once I get the little guys to bed tonight."

I was still sitting around the living room but now I'd been upgraded to watching movies with Eva and Jonathan Musgrove. Their parents were at the same dinner party thing as Kevin and Maya, so theoretically Gretchen was babysitting them because Marietta was out with Jackson Hayter and Benjamin Musgrove was at a party and his fourteen-year-old brother, Nick, was playing some video game with a bunch of his friends. So while Gretchen painted her toenails and pretended to supervise her younger siblings, I was actually supervising/entertaining them. We were watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but Eva paused the movie when Anna came inside with the little boys because "Josh is scared of it. Mom doesn't let them watch it, obviously; they're way too young. But Josh saw a couple minutes of it once and it really scared him." She smiled at me. "Plus, Anna doesn't want them watching movies like that and I understand what she's thinking there."

Anna looked so responsible, too old for her twenty-eight years. She had her glasses on and her short dark brown hair was in a ponytail that looked altogether too matronly for her age. Her clothes were the same Audrey Hepburn-esque classically elegant pieces she'd worn in college. That day, she was wearing a pair of dark blue jeans and a simple light blue t-shirt. She was beautiful; she had such classic, timeless looks, but she looked so sad. I didn't understand her life anymore. I didn't understand why she let people walk over her all the time.


Late that night, I walked into my sister's dark house knowing that Sophia and Harrison were both in bed by now. Lying on the floor of the foyer was a piece of paper. I picked it up; it was a page from a manuscript, probably one of my sister's. In the middle of the page was an italicized section, set apart from the rest of the text. I read the words, which were from a Tennyson poem. Anna loved Tennyson; I remembered that from an English class she took her last semester at Berkley. Sophia wasn't crazy about him but maybe she was using him as a literary device. The poem seemed like it could be used like that.

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

-Ulysses (lines 66-70) Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I didn't read the whole page, but it looked like my sister was writing a different kind of story. Most of her stories were about good triumphing and happy endings. But this story didn't look like it would necessarily have a happily ever after. The one line of dialogue that caught my eye read "And then Meghan sighed as she looked at Gregory. 'It's just not reasonable or rational,' she told him severely. 'We're too different people living different lives. Just forget it; we could never make it work.' Her dark eyes grew darker as tears brimmed to the surface and she turned her head away. Gregory's gaze remained fixed, steady, and emotionless. But before he could say anything, Meghan had walked away from him."

I could completely relate to this Gregory character that my sister was writing. Okay, so I'd been the one who had walked away when Anna was explaining why we couldn't be together. But I'd been justified. She was being an idiot. She threw away everything we had because of her family. I couldn't understand that. I had to walk away from her. At the age of twenty, there was no way I could agree to play second fiddle to a girl's family for the next fifty or sixty years. And even now I'm not sure I could do that. To marry me, a girl has to have her priorities in line. She also had to know her own mind and keep her promises. In short, I could never marry Anna Clarissa Eliot. She's too indecisive and unreliable when it comes to keeping her promises.


At breakfast the next morning, I gave my sister the sheet of paper I'd found the night before. She took it wordlessly and nodded. I gathered that she'd rather I'd not seen that page. But Sophia was always rather protective of her manuscripts; she didn't even like it when Harry saw them. She rarely let anyone read them other than her editor. Sophia's editor, by the way, is crazy. She has the weirdest concept of time. She does really well with the whole keeping Sophia to her deadlines thing but she's famous for calling her writers at like three in the morning. Estella, that's her name, also chain smokes. Both of the two times I've met her she was smoking cigarettes that were coated in bright red lipstick. She stroked my cheek and called me "Alex, dahling." She also offered to kiss me before Sophia told her to keep her lips to herself.

Sophia was actually on the phone with Estella when I finished my breakfast. I could hear her distinctively nasal Midwestern voice through the phone. Estella only had two volumes: louder and painfully loud. "When are you coming to New York?" she bellowed. "We need to talk about your next book."

"I'm planning on being there in August or September," she said. "But Estella, I'm not really working on anything right now. I have a couple of ideas floating around in my head."

"And on your computer, I hope," I heard Estella hiss.

"Yes, they're on my computer," Sophia said with a frustrated sigh.

"Good, then bring them to New York with you when you come. We'll have coffee and talk. I want to see these ideas. You haven't published in over two years; you have to stay in the public mindset. You don't want these people to forget about you."

"Harper Lee published one book in her whole life and the public has never forgotten her. And on the other hand, do you think that Sophie Kinsella or Danielle Steele will remain famous after they die? One profound piece of literature in a lifetime is better than publishing dozens of second-rate fluff pieces."

I didn't hear Estella's response to that but a few minutes later, I heard my sister add, "And I hate those ridiculous talk shows you make me go on all the time. I have better things to do than to talk to people about how I have a completely boring personal life. Maybe I should have a baby or something."

"But that would interfere with your writing!" the editor rasped her protest.

Honestly, I had never considered the idea that Harrison and Sophia might have a baby. I had just always thought of them as a married couple and that was that. For some reason, I never thought of my sister as capable of having children. I don't know why; I just never thought it was a possibility in her life. What would I do if Sophia and Harrison had a baby? I had never contemplated the idea that my big sister and her husband would want a family. Harrison was sixty and somehow I had just automatically written him off as too old to be a dad. I didn't know if my sister was just joking around but this new idea that had entered into my head was befuddling. What would happen if my older sister became a mother? My older brother, Nicholas, was married and had two sons and a daughter, but he was a Greek Orthodox priest and everything in his life was so different than anything in Sophia's life or in mine. It was natural to me that Nicholas was married and had two energetic sons and one adorable daughter. But the idea of Sophia with a child hadn't entered my head since she gave her up her dolls over twenty years ago.


The next morning, we boarded a flight bound for Chicago. Due to some mix-up with the tickets, it was necessary that one of us had to sit separately from the rest of the group. This separate seat had been assigned to Gretchen but she threw a fit and started crying in the aisle of the plane when she realized that she wouldn't be able to sit with the rest of us. As Gretchen threw herself at me pounding my chest and sobbing, Anna spoke up without hesitation. "Oh, Gretchen, take a deep breath and calm down. I'll sit in your seat and you can take mine. Don't worry about it."

Immediately, Gretchen wiped her face and a bright smile lit up her face. She bounced into her new seat, which was next to me. "Isn't this fantastic?" she enthused. "We get to spend the whole plane ride sitting next to each other. I'm so excited; we can talk about so much."

"It'll be great," I said, knowing how unenthusiastic I sounded. My eyes fell on Anna sitting by herself in between two businessmen in suits who looked like they would never give anyone other than their laptops a second glance during the next four or five hours.

"I love flying," she continued in her ramble. "The window seat is always my favorite. Oh, Anna is sitting in the middle. That sucks for her; I'm so glad she's sitting there instead of me. I would have hated it and here I can have the window seat and talk to you."

Poor Anna, I thought. Gretchen didn't deserve what Anna had done for her. It was something simple, a seat on an airplane. But it represented something so much larger. Time and again, Anna did little things for Gretchen, and for so many other people, with no thanks. In all honesty, she made it nearly impossible for me to hate her. I could be as angry as I wanted over the way our relationship ended. But her life was too pitiful, too pathetic for me to hate her. She was a good person who always put other people first. In the past two months, I had never seen her make a selfish move. She helped other people; she was turning into a saint in front of my eyes. And I couldn't bear to watch it. I fixed my attention on Gretchen and tried to ignore the fact that my ex-fiancée was not far away and probably absolutely miserable

A/N: Please review! I need the encouragement. I hope you guys like this.