“I scarcely know him.” Wendy pulls her hands back, folds them in her lap. The weight of all her doubt and uncertainty, lifted a moment before, returns. Words pile up behind her teeth, but Wendy can’t think of how to speak them. This is Mary, they’ve never had secrets before, but not all of the secrets she carries now are hers to share.

Husband and wife. Of one flesh. Is this what it means to be joined in marriage, truly? From now on, she must carry Ned’s burdens too, as well as her own. If Mary were truly part of their family, perhaps… No, she pushes the thoughts down again. It is too much, too soon.

She focuses instead on Mary’s question, thinking how to answer it. Ned. Wendy conjures up his face, his kind eyes, his blushing stammer. At times, it barely makes itself known in his speech. Other times, usually when his father is around or a visit is imminent, he can scarcely get out his words.

Wendy thinks of the day they met, how he could barely look at her. And she herself, newly walked out of this place, practically new to the world. Can it really be less than a year? It seems like a lifetime ago.

Wendy looks up and finds Mary watching her patiently. She aches, the urge to speak and remain silent warring in her. If she could simply communicate with a look and have Mary understand everything that she is, everything she and Ned are together, it would be so much simpler.

“I… I think I might come to love him in time, but it’s…” Wendy hesitates; the words refuse to come easily. She understands Ned, at least in part. It is her own piece of the puzzle Wendy now struggles to understand.

On their wedding night, instead of coming to her as a husband, Ned had silently handed Wendy a bundle of letters. The edges of some had been burned, the paper frail and flaking and smelling of ash.

“I barely managed to save them,” he’d told her. She’d looked at him, questioning, but he’d only said, “You should know, and understand who it is you’ve married.”

He’d moved toward the window, leaving her to sit on their marriage bed with the letters in her lap. She’d felt a moment of relief, uncertain how things would be between them once they were wed, uncertain she wanted him as a husband when she’d barely begun to know him as a friend. Her own emotions had been a complicated knot settled in her stomach, where Ned’s had been stark on his face—sorrow and pain, hope and the willingness to trust braided together into one.