Is it good?
Ernest wanted Hadley to read something of his. It was not a story yet—“more like a sketch.” He tucked his chin “nervously,” waiting for Hadley’s answer. The story that Ernest gave her was “a darkly funny sketch called 'Wolves and Donuts' set in an Italian restaurant on Wabash Avenue.” As Hadley read, Ernest paced the room, “his arms swinging and pawing the air as he waited” for her to answer. He “couldn’t bring himself to ask” if it was “good.” Hadley’s admiration was the reaction he wanted and needed to get.
What if it didn’t exist at all?
Hadley’s mother was particularly fond of the Ouija. Years ago, she and Mrs. Curran spoke to Dorothea—Kate and Hadley’s older sister—about her. They asked her “several times” and she “rebuffed” them. She had “nothing to say.” Though Hadley was always “skeptical of the occult,” she “felt a rush of cold” through her. “Was it possible that Mother had been in touch with Dorothea?” Why had her sister, “dead for nine years,” turned her back on Hadley? The poor woman wondered if Dorothea knew “something hard and sad” about Hadley’s fate. The idea “terrified” her and yet “there was no way to be certain.” “What if the future was worse than the present?” Hadley asked herself, “What if it didn’t exist at all?”
You could fight for him, you know.
Hadley loved Ernest immensely, he was her universe and she seriously planned to spend the rest of her life with him. However, deep in the heart, she knew that Ernest would leave her sooner or later. Though Hadley had been prepared for it, she couldn’t even imagine how much it would hurt. “Nothing at all seemed permanent” to her “except what was already behind” her, what she and Ernest had “already done and lived together.” “You could fight for him, you know,” said Don Stewart one day, but Hadley knew that it was futile. Their love story had ended.
