“I am not Meg,” she almost snapped. Laurie looked so frustrated as if he was seriously considering pulling out his hair.
“I need an actual answer,” he persisted. “What other reason do you have?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have changed,” he said.
“You have?”
“I have given up everything: gambling, billiards, cards, the company of those rakes…”
“You needn’t change for me,” Jo said.
“I changed for you initially, but I found I wanted to change for myself. You were right; that was not me. I… You saved me again, Jo. I’m free of all that. I am your Laurie.”
Jo nodded, her heart full.He remembers every word I ever said to him. He changed for me.
“What other reason do you have?” he persisted.
“I…” She had ran out of words.
“You’re scared.” He said it gently, but it was an accusation all the same.
Jo had been confused before, but this enraged her. Now he’d done it, the foolish boy. She was furious.
She stood abruptly, forgetting all of Meg’s lessons about ‘moving gracefully, like a lady’.
“I am not,” she hissed indignantly. “I’m not scared—I only want things to stay as they are. Why must anything change?”
“Coward,” Teddy murmured to himself. Was the idiotsmiling?
“I amnota coward!” She was fighting the urge to stomp her foot. “You are the one… You are ruining everything!”
“What everything, Jo? What am I ruining? By telling you I love you? That I want to never be parted from you, not for one second?”
Jo opened her mouth—then closed it.
How could he not see it?
“Everything. Just everything,” she said, her voice defeated, small. Lost.
But Laurie, pacing around, drowning in his own pain, paid her no mind.
Two years ago
Dear Beth,
Teddy has new friends.
You know that’s what I call him when we are doing utterly nonsensical things together—which is most of the time. I have called him ‘Teddy’ since we were children, and I see no reason to stop. He calls me ‘Jo’, which I love. He’s the only one left who calls me that.
Meg absolutely refuses to answer to what she calls ‘a silly childhood nickname’, so she must be ‘Margaret’ now.
Oh how I hate growing up.
Anyway, I was upstairs in my room, writing by the window, when I saw Teddy come down the short path that he and I opened between our two properties as a shortcut. He was running at full speed, and I took the stairs three at a time, much to Papa’s consternation, to meet him at the door. He was breathless—he had come with news.
‘I’m off to London!’ he told me excitedly.