Charles Williams: Hell Hath No Fury

But in the final analysis her sentence will soon be over, and I’m the one who is doing life. In a little over two months now she’ll be free and can walk out of the office for the last time and go on with a life of her own. I think she and Eddie Something date a lot now that he’s home from college, and nothing is hopeless or irrevocable when you’re twenty-one. I’m the one who couldn’t make it. I had a try-out in the big leagues, but I didn’t have the stuff, and they sent me back. I’ve found my own level again, and I’m living with it.

Maybe it’ll be better when she’s gone, and maybe it’ll be worse. At least I get to see her now. I ask her if she knows where this paper is, or that paper, and she says, “Yes, Mr. Madox,” and I look at her, thinking of that morning a little less than a year ago, in this same office, when I saw her for the first time, very fresh and lovely and looking like a long-stemmed yellow rose, and I have to fight down that almost unbearable longing to cry out to her and ask her if she ever thinks of it, or remembers it, or the day Spunky was lost and I held her face in my hands and kissed her, or the night on the bridge when she said she loved me.

But I never ask it. There’s no need to, because I know what she would say.

“No, Mr. Madox.”