Why should he be jealous? It had been his decision to stay out of her life, and the choice had been made for her own good. Every time he saw her, though, he came closer and closer to ruing the decision he had made. In her time at Budapest, he saw her grow and mature, not only as a mathematician, but also as a woman. Each visit made him more aware of her budding grace, her beauty that was no longer childlike. He began to make excuses to come to the academy more often, every time knowing that he was playing with fire.
The semester went on and on, and his work made progress in leaps and bounds now that he was actively sharing ideas with the interns and assistants. Each day brought him closer to the answer to his problem, and at the same time closer to the day when Brynn would leave and go back to America to graduate, find a job, marry someone else. Eliot tortured himself with imagining her future husband, her future family, her future life without him. He was no idiot. She was young and had the rest of her future in front of her, and he was sure her brief experiences with him had disillusioned her about the possibility of staying with him. No, that chance had come and gone, if it ever existed.
He lectured at the front of the classroom, but his lectures were directed solely towards her, and although she never raised her hand to ask a question, he tried to read her expression to know what parts he needed to explain more thoroughly. And although she stayed quiet, the last words she had directed his way echoed incessantly through his mind:
When will you go to visit your wife?
It was a beautiful spring day, only a few weeks before the semester was due to be over, and driving down to the academy he opened the windows and breathed in the fresh cool air. Normally he would have turned off of the main road to the academy to avoid passing the cemetery, but for some reason that day he didn’t; not a conscious decision, no, not at all. When his car passed by the cemetery he braked hard and pulled over to the curb. Sitting at the wheel, his throat choked with tension, and he willed himself to relax. He looked up to the front of the cemetery, and the open doors seemed to call him inside, the sun shining brightly above.
When will you go visit your wife?
He left the car at the curb and walked through the iron gate. The grass underneath his feet squished wetly with the dampness from the thawed winter frosts, and everything grew bright and green between the stone graves. In places where the caretaker had forgotten to mow tiny alyssum blossoms had taken hold and spread their white petals in the shade of gravestones. His feet took him quickly to the family plot, though he paused before opening the gate and walking over.#p#分页标题#e#
His mother had not wanted Clare buried in the same plot, but Eliot had insisted that she was just as much a part of the Herceg family as any other. They had only been married less than a year before she died. Before he killed her.
Drawing closer to the gravestone, Eliot blinked hard. The stone was surrounded by grass but right in front of Clare’s stone lay a small bouquet of white roses. He bent down and picked them up, brought them to his nose and inhaled. The smell was still fresh, the roses new and alive. His eyes turned to the gravestone, reading the words engraved there.
“Clare, oh Clare.” He fell to his knees and pressed his forehead to the cold stone, his eyes closed. He began to talk, haltingly at first, in a low whisper that couldn’t be heard by any living soul.
“I miss you Clare. I see you—god, I see you every day, everywhere. It’s a beautiful day today. Sunny and cold, your perfect day. I’m sorry you can’t be here to see it. The ice is melting and the stream has come up in the back. I go out and sit there and think about you.
“The problem is going well. We just solved another specific case; this one was much harder, but I think I can generalize it—of course, don’t let me go on and on about math. You always let me go on for far too long. There’s someone helping me—”
Eliot breathed in deeply before continuing.
“She’s lovely. You told me that if anything happened to either of us, we should find happiness.”
Eliot’s voice shattered on the last word, and tears streamed down his cheeks. The guilt he carried inside of him flared up and made his skin burn with shame.
“I haven’t been happy, Clare. I haven’t. I haven’t ever let myself be happy. And I know—I know you would want me to let go, but I can’t. I just can’t. I miss you so much and I’m sorry I hurt you. I wish I could go back and live through it again. I would—”
He stopped. He thought of what he would say—that he would never have tried to woo her, never taken her away from her life and put her in a place where she would die so meaninglessly. But that wasn’t right. He couldn’t erase the past like that. Every beautiful moment spent with Clare taken away? No. No. He did not know what he wanted, but it was not that.