Revenge. She doesn’t say the word aloud. Would she strike back at Jamieson if she could? And Peter? If Mary was given the chance, would she lash out at the man who put her here?

“No.” Mary snaps her answer. The wet-pine of her eyes looks darker still, the black at their center going almost all the way to the edges to swallow up the ring of brown.

“I don’t want anything from him, and I don’t owe him anything either. We were never family. He isn’t anything to me, and he isn’t worth even a moment of my time.”

Mary’s grip tightens, matching the vehemence of her words. It’s a different kind of anger than she’s seen in Mary before, and it makes her wonder whether Mary is trying to convince herself with her words. The man who married her mother means nothing to her, and yet he is a wound that hasn’t entirely healed.

“I wouldn’t go back to Canada either.” Mary answers Wendy’s unspoken question, and relief stings her eyes. She swallows hard as Mary goes on. “I don’t… My people are there, but I don’t know them, not really. I was so young when I left. I don’t know where I belong.”

Wendy almost shouts here, with me, but she holds her tongue. It isn’t her place to presume, no matter how much she aches at the thought of leaving Mary behind, going out into the world to marry a man she doesn’t even know.

“I’d like to travel,” Mary continues, “but it isn’t easy.”

Mary lifts their clasped hands; the sun dapples through the tree overhead and hits the contrast in their skin, speaking for her. Mary lowers her head, as if afraid her hope will betray her if she speaks too loud.

“Ever since I’ve been working in the kitchens here I’ve started to think that I would like to have a little bakery, my own shop, but…”

Mary raises their clasped hands again, the same answer, and it strikes Wendy that Mary doesn’t expect to ever leave; she expects to grow old and die without ever seeing the world outside the walls of St. Bernadette’s again. Wendy’s pulse snags on hurt, a vicious anger rising through her. The world of men and their rules, forever saying what women—especially women who look like Mary—can and cannot do.

The unfairness presses on Wendy’s skin, and her body feels too small to contain all the injustice.

“Are you really going to do it?” Mary asks after a moment of silence.