Julia sat, clear-eyed and pale, in their bedroom. She had no concept of the passing hours and sliding shadows. She was so still she might have been a statue, carved from granite. For truly, she felt as cold and stiff as marble. Weighted down with sorrow, frozen in a loop of hurt she could not escape. Her mind, however, was a riot.
It wouldn't be the first time you've grown tired of marriage.
No. No, it would not be the first time a husband sought to cage her with his jealousy and ask her to be less of herself. It wouldn't be the first time she was expected to compromise her very self as an act of honor and obedience. Darcy believed she should be otherwise for his ambition. William believed she should be otherwise for his God.
Was she never to be simply Julia? To follow her path, difficult though it may be, without being expected to change her very nature to appease the men in her life? Would she spend the rest of her marriage in competition with a Divine Entity against whom she could never measure up?
It had been foolishness to believe William understood her after all this time. It had been naivete to think he would trust her decisions, even when he (or his God) did not agree with them.
Admittedly, God had not been present in her thoughts when she had administered the final dose. She could think only of the tortured young woman before her, the oath she swore to do no harm, and the realization that harm was not quite so easy to define. It was harm to leave a woman to languish in pain for all eternity. It was harm to stand by and do nothing.
It was harm to withhold euthanization and she would not have been able to live with herself.
Now, it seemed, William could not live with her, either.
The accusation of infidelity was unfair, although not unexpected. She had often wondered when William would let lose his insecurities about that part of her past, unwilling or unable to acknowledge his participation. They had not been physically intimate at the time - not for her lack of trying - but she had betrayed Darcy in every other way possible. With William. In her own mind, it was Darcy with whom she had been unfaithful. She had wed him and bed him, even while consumed with love for William. Her marriage to Darcy was the ultimate betrayal of William, both as a way to escape him and a way to punish him for not loving her enough. It would remain the greatest shame of her life. If William would use her abortion as ammunition, she knew this, too, would be in his quiver and he would take aim at some point.
She had not expected it to be now, when her defenses were so low. She had all but begged him to be her lifeline, to hold her heart when she was so very very lost. He had turned away and, when she believed she could not be brought any lower, he had drawn all the oxygen from her lungs with a few simple words.
It wouldn't be the first time you've grown tired of marriage.
Slowly, as the sun began to peek through the windows, Julia slumped across the bed. Her head aching, her shoulders stiff, her fingers chilled. The sheets still smelled of William's cologne and she pressed her nose into his pillow, inhaling deeply.
It was then, finally then, that Julia began to cry.
He didn't drink. He craved oblivion as he'd never done before save those first few months after Julia had left him for Buffalo, but he abstained.
Instead, he prayed.
He prayed as he hadn't since Liza lay dying. He prayed for himself. For Julia. He prayed for forgiveness and release, for guidance. He prayed until his knees were numb on the wooden floor, his knuckles white, his fingers numb. He welcomed the pain, begged for absolution, and wept for answers.
Dawn took its time in arriving, and in the darkness William was forced to relive over and over the look on his wife's face and he spoke those unspeakable words.
It wouldn't be the first time you've grown tired of marriage.
He did not believe Julia to be unfaithful. Even as the cartilage of Dr Dixon's nose crumpled under his knuckles, he knew Julia had never- and would never - betray him. Not physically and not emotionally. His actions had not been about Julia at all, he knew, but about the guilt festering in him for years over the part he played in the dissolution of Julia's union to Darcy. William had been waiting for God's judgement and punishment to arrive, as he'd never quite been able to ask forgiveness for what he'd done. There was no deity, no canon law, no commandment that could convince him that loving Julia was wrong. And yet he'd awaited punishment nonetheless.
Andrew Dixon arrived and to William he was the harbinger of that punishment. He was the one who would awaken Julia to the mistake she'd made in wedding William. A young, attractive, educated, wealthy doctor who could share more fully the burdens she carried. Whose own religion was that of Hippocrates, just like her. A man who chased the mysteries of the human body to prevent death, not simply solve it.
For William Murdoch, hell wasn't a fiery pit in the afterlife. It was the earthly torment of life without Julia Ogden. A torment he faced at that very moment, a locked bedroom door and a chasm of hurt between them along with the potential loss of something primal to the both of them.
One another.