The Hidden Goddess

Emily already knew there was going to be hell to pay, and she supposed there was no use allowing it to accrue interest.

Emily pounded on the door, assuming it would do no good, but finding the act of pounding very satisfying indeed.

“It is a great weakness of credomancers, Miss Edwards. They often believe their own press.”

”You’re a credomancer, too,” Emily said.

“I’m also a woman. Failure, struggle, and doubt are my constant companions. They are not always pleasant, but they inoculate me against overconfidence. As such, I would not trade them for all the arrogant bravado in the world.”

She was painfully aware that doing one’s best was never assurance that it wasn’t the wrong choice anyway.

The obsessive rules of etiquette struck Emily as mean-spirited, like the old trick of tying someone’s shoelaces under the table. It was only fun if you liked watching people fall down.

Nothing is ever what you want it to be. The harder you grab for it, the more deeply it cuts. And it mocks you for being foolish enough to reach for it at all. You come to fear touching anything at all, because you know that if you do, it will become terrible.

But it was impossible to remain so long in the company of a female, even a divine one, without suffering some form of disillusionment.

The shortness of the woman’s replies indicated that Emily was asking questions Miss Jesczenka didn’t particularly want to answer, but those were usually the questions that most needed to be asked.

In his idle hours, Heusler sometimes amused himself by trying to conceive of a crime a mortal man could commit that was more monstrous than making a goddess fall in love with him. He had never succeeded.

I don’t think that’s the answer he was looking for. It’s not the answer I was looking for. But maybe it’s the right one.

“Credomancy may seek to exploit the human desire for a tidy narrative where an unblemished romantic hero vanquishes all obstacles, but such ideals have very little to do with reality. Reality requires pragmatism and compromise. Men fail. Women fail. There are no heroes, only human beings who somehow find the strength to behave heroically, no matter how many times they have been unable to do so in the past. If you understand that, Miss Edwards—if you truly and deeply understand that, then you will understand the most powerful thing anyone with a heart can understand.”

“And what’s that?” Emily said softly.

“That love is not enough. But it’s a start.”

There is a difference between not understanding and being willfully obtuse.

“I’m sorry Mr. Stanton, really I am. I didn’t mean to miss it. Things...happened.”

“Oh, well. Things happened. How nice to have that cleared up.”

It was disappointing, as if a wish she didn’t know she’d made hadn’t come true.

“What kind of idiot do you think I am?”

”I have no idea what kind of idiot you are,” Miss Jesczenka said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

Could one die from boredom, she wondered? From complete, oppressive, crushing, unmitigated boredom, the likes of which made all other boredom seem like ecstasy’s sweet thrilling embrace? And in such a case, if one happened to have a life insurance policy, would it pay?

It was her own evil assumptions that had done her in. She hadn’t even considered the third possible explanation for his strange behavior—that he was a perfectly nice man, without an ounce of guile, just trying to be helpful. People helped people in California. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d only been in New York a few weeks, and already she was turning hard and suspicious.

Having engaged in vigorous and passionate debate while on their honeymoon trip from New York, they had arrived at the startling—and rather liberating—conclusion that the marriage itself was not at all necessary. Stanton no longer had a name to give, and taking Emily’s would have involved all the tedium of authority and nonsense they’d hoped to avoid. So, in the end, he had returned to her the simple gold band she had worn for so long, sliding it onto the ring finger of her new right hand. And she had given him a soft slow kiss. They were the only vows required.

“Was your mother furious?”

“She’ll get over it,” Stanton said. “Perhaps not in this lifetime, but I happen to believe in reincarnation, so there’s still hope.”

“Your frontier ethics are so rawboned, Miss Edwards, as rough-hewn and clumsy as the log cabin in which you must have been raised.” Mrs. Stanton’s face was like marble as she spoke; only her lips moved with ugly precision. “Decency is striving for perfection in a world in which every other hoglike creature satisfies himself with sloppiness and indulgence. Decency is not in failing to murder someone. It’s in murdering the right person, and sparing your family the indignity of getting caught.”

“Don’t lie,” he said. “That’s my job.”

Sadly, there is a fine line between patriotism and paranoia.

Love. Such a lot of damn fuss.

Spread out before the pyramid, as far as the eye could see, stretched a frozen ocean of blackness—stinking oily blackness that bubbled and churned. Voider than void, colder than cold, deader than dead.

It is your world.

It is the world we will make for you.

“I wasn’t sure if we were still engaged.”

“After everything we’ve been through? After true love conquered all?” Emily shook her head. “Being dead had done nothing to alleviate your obtuseness, Mr. Stanton.”

“Being dead allowed me to learn the heart’s deepest secret,” he said. “That sometimes love—even true love—isn’t enough.”

”But it’s a start,” Emily said.