The door to Glinda's room creaked open slowly. "Are you here, darling?" Larena peered round cautiously.
As if Glinda had been anywhere but in two weeks.
"You can come in," Glinda said, wearily extending her mother a basic courtesy in her own home.
Except her mother was clutching at a letter.
Another one.
She proffered it.
"Could you just put it with the others?"
Larena added it to the two unopened on Glinda's bureau. She approached gently and perched on the end of Glinda's bed.
"Will you come into town with me?"
A similar entreaty had come each day. "Not today, Mother."
"What will you do?"
"Read a while, maybe take a walk." She might as well have said she planned to swim in Kellswater – it was just as likely to happen. She would open a book to lie unread in her lap and the "walk" would take the form of a mooch down to the kitchen to see what she could pilfer.
"Maybe tomorrow?" her mother asked, in a triumph of hope over experience.
"Perhaps. I hope it goes well."
Her mother left and Glinda lay a while longer, rolling around as she grew increasingly uncomfortable. She'd be developing bedsores before long. So she put on a dressing gown and followed her nose to the kitchen to swipe some pastries. She sat alone in the dining room, chewing despondently. Chewing the cud like the bellowing cows outside the window.
She contemplated how things had gotten so far out of hand. How willingly she had fallen into such total deceit. How she had jeopardised everything. Her relationship with her parents, her university career... Elphaba. Not just her relationship with Elphaba but Elphaba's relationship with her own self. Jeopardised Elphaba in general.
She did not want to know what Elphaba was thinking. What recriminations and accusations the letters upstairs might hold.
This was a circumstance she could not begin to unravel.
Elphaba said - and wasn't that half of what had got Glinda into this trouble! - that Glinda was searching for something. For a coming-to-terms with her parents. But, that achieved, Glinda felt no better. Because it was based on a lie? She had extracted kindness and understanding from them under false pretences.
It wasn't that she missed Elphaba. No. She missed her life at Shiz, as strange as it had been for a long time. Her independence, the city. How she and Elphaba could disappear over the garden wall. How Nessa and Nanny baited Elphaba in the Buttery and Elphaba's responses, heavy with distraction and love. How Elphaba was so easily sought out, perched around every corner. How Glinda looked for her now, in every chair, on every bed, behind every door.
Perhaps she missed Elphaba.
Perhaps she missed Elphaba in ways she hadn't known were possible. The constant exhaustion of it. Sometimes the absence of Elphaba hit her so hard she needed to sit.
Then, the knowledge of how she had hurt Elphaba made her curl up in the chair, shaking with the frustration of tears she couldn't shed. She had no right to be sad.
She drew a chair to the window of the dining room and looked out. She could go out, there was nothing stopping her. Bar her own self-imposed imprisonment. It was a punishment that she could break at any time. And yet it was impossible.
To save any more introspection her body lulled her into a merciful sleep instead.
The house was dark when Glinda woke, all manner of stiff and displeased. Her joints cracked as she rose and she hobbled to the stairs like an old woman. The hall was still and silent. But up the stairs, she noticed as she hauled herself up slowly, there was a light in the corridor to her room.
Glinda heard the gentle creak of the floorboards in her room, the tapping of shoes on the wood. Moving slowly now for stealth rather than aches and pains, she drew level with the door. Her heart pounded as she looked round, even though she knew what she would see.
There was her mother, casting a long shadow in the light of a single lamp, leaning over Glinda's desk.
Glinda cleared her throat. Not to be dramatic. More because she wasn't sure what to say.
"Oh!" Larena exclaimed. "I thought you had gone out."
"Would it have been acceptable to rifle through my things if I were out, rather than at home?"
"I'm sorry."
Glinda stalked over and snatched the letters from her mother's hands. She had immediately known exactly what her mother was looking for. She held the envelopes gently. As though they were combustible. As though they could explode, and take Glinda with them.
"It's just that I am so worried about you."
"Don't tell me, you were doing it for my own good. I've heard that one before."
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that then and I'm sorry for this now. But, sweetheart, I am so worried about you."
Of course she was, Glinda knew she was. Her mother was stressed and wrung thin. Glinda had done that. It was a punishment.
"Will you not talk to me?" Larena continued. "I want to understand. I want to help."
"I don't want to talk."
"If not to me, then to someone else? Your father?"
Glinda almost laughed out loud. "No, I will spare him that. I don't want to talk to anyone."
"I would understand if you did not trust me with your confidences."
"It's not that." Yet, Glinda was talking. "I wouldn't even know what to say."
"Why will you not open Elphaba's letters? If you have quarreled perhaps she wishes to be reconciled?"
"We didn't quarrel. No more than usual." She smiled a little at the fond memory of their many and frequent quarrels.
"Well then…" Larena was at a loss. "Whatever it is, Elphaba clearly misses you."
Looking back down at the letters in her hands Glinda wished she could be so sure. She had, of course, considered that the letters might be filled with sadness and kindnesses. Equally - more than equally - likely - they were filled with remonstrations and admonitions. The risk of the latter was too great. If Glinda didn't open them, she never had to face it.
"You don't understand," Glinda said.
"I want to," her mother near enough pleaded. "Let me show you. That I love you no matter what."
"I fell in love with her - I didn't murder her," Glinda pointed out, irritated.
"No, you are right. I must be aware of my language. I didn't mean to imply there was anything wrong with…"
Her mother continued to speak. But Glinda was distracted by the out of body experience she was currently undergoing.
Her throat constricted. "I love her," she choked.
"Oh yes," her mother hurried to say. "Of course you do and it is wonderful."
"No," Glinda said, tears falling now. "I really love her. I am in love with Elphaba."
Her mother confused and Glinda inconsolable, Larena put her arms around her daughter. "It will be all right, my love," she soothed.
"It is so very far from all right."
Glinda was engulfed by the visceral sensations of loving Elphaba. The touch of Elphaba's hands, the warmth of her body in bed beside her, the sound of her breath across the room in the night. The warmth of it rose up to smother her.
Every moment together happened again all at once and the combined force of it was crushing.
To escape, Glinda leapt up and paced the room. "No," she commanded herself sternly. Futilely.
And yet, it all made such a terrible, perfect sense. She was in love with Elphaba and it seemed so obvious now.
How long had her world revolved around Elphaba? Longer than Glinda cared to admit or would have admitted at the time. For so long it had become second nature and totally unremarkable. It hardly registered. It just was.
Nothing was an accident. Elphaba's name appearing from her pen. Urging Elphaba into a ruse. Bringing Elphaba here to Frottica.
Glinda moaned as the pieces crashed rather than fell into place. Great big boulders shot through her mind, careening and splintering, wrecking everything. "What have I done?"
Unable to answer the question, unwilling to even begun assessing the damage she had caused and the sinister pall cast over her motives, she instead wept on her uncomprehending mother's shoulder some more, until darkness had entirely fallen.
Glinda finally fell asleep just before dawn only to wake a few hours later after stressful dreams of her textbooks written in a foreign tongue she was expected to understand but that slipped from her grasp.
Her mother was asleep in her bed, with Glinda curled at the foot.
It was barely a clock tick before Elphaba was there in her mind. Which was the case every day. Now it felt like a haunting. Even splashing water on her face could not banish the reproachful spectre.
She looked up at herself in the glass.
"No," she commanded herself sternly. Not an instruction not to go down that path, it had already happened and there was no coming back now. She had fallen in love with Elphaba, not only that but been so out of touch with her own feelings that it had come as such a shock. The "no" was to wallowing, to slipping further, to unspooling. She would not sink into despair over what she had done to Elphaba and how Elphaba must now hate her.
Glinda resolved there and then to do her penance and undertake a radical course in self-improvement.
This was in no way about deserving Elphaba or redeeming herself as she was convinced that was an impossibility. Elphaba's letters remained unopened on her bureau. A reconciliation with Elphaba was not on the cards anytime soon. Instead, Glinda turned to the only person she had any control over in the world - herself.
Having moped for a straight fortnight she went on a walk but in nine invigorating miles could not answer the single question: how had she not known?
It was a question that by turns eluded her and she attempted to elude it. She would ponder it for hours sometimes. Other times she would bury herself in reading something musty and serious or polishing the silverware or even shovelling manure just to avoid thinking about it.
There was a question looming in her future, shouted by the birds each morning and suspended on the sunset each evening: what was she going to do?
That question Glinda refused to even acknowledge. Not yet. She had time, she could put it off indefinitely if necessary.
"You are doing so much better, my darling," her mother said a few days later when Glinda actually appeared for breakfast.
"Yes, I suppose I am," Glinda said. 'Better' was not exactly how she would put it. Different. Calmer, certainly. Resigned, perhaps. But at least no longer at a loss as she had been in the first weeks after returning home.
Until her father came in, glanced helplessly at Larena, and placed a letter on the table in front of Glinda.
Immaculate handwriting glared at her reproachfully. I know, she told it silently.
"Thank you, Papa."
After breakfast she took the letter to sit with its brethren then threw herself at the mercy and distraction of the day and drove into Frottica with her father to the cattle market. If this seemed remarkable it's because it was and she received several strange glances. But her father took her arm proudly and said how pleased he was that she had come.
And so she went to other places with him, received deliveries, loaded milk churns and received her very first blister, of which she was inordinately proud.
Her father and Hapa the cowherd tried to dissuade her but Glinda was determined to double down on her injuries. She was back in the cowshed the next day, shovelling piles of shit that had to be seen to be believed. She fantasised about her hands growing calloused, that she might have evidence of how she was improving herself. How she was facing up to the realities of life - even if they were totally unrelated to her current problems.
She was regularly checked on, poor Hapa quite beside himself with having Miss Galinda in the yard. She would shovel and try to come up with thoughtful questions for him, to show she respected his craft and experience.
Now there was a creaking at the door of the shed. A good opportunity to take a break while discovering more about vermiculture. Also to get some fresh air.
"Yoohoo! Hapa!" Glinda headed to the door, wiping her hands on her smock though they retained almost every iota of dirt and picked up some straw besides.
"Hapa, I wondered -"
Glinda looked to the door.
"Oh, of course, it's you," she said, on many levels totally unsurprised even as every cell in her body leapt in terror.
"Yes," said Elphaba. "It's me."