Chapter Text
And when I sleep on your couch
I feel very safe
And when you bring the blankets
I cover up my face
(I do love you)
—
The apartment is small. The bedroom connects to the kitchen without a door for privacy, the bathroom’s mirror is cracked, there’s barely enough space for a double bed, and there’s a dark, suspicious stain on the ceiling, creeping out from the corner of the main room like a vine.
Beatrice loves it immediately and intensely, in a way she tries to avoid thinking about.
“Yeesh. The Church couldn’t have sprung for a two bedroom?” Ava asks, nose scrunched as she takes in the empty space, and Beatrice is no longer able to avoid thinking about it.
(She loves the apartment intensely, and how could she not, given the woman standing in the middle of it?)
“We’re meant to be two normal girls on sabbatical after university. Why would we be able to afford anything more than a studio?”
“Well,” Ava begins, spinning around until Beatrice can see the wide grin, the warming brown of her eyes. “We could be two rich girls on sabbatical after university. We could have very wealthy parents who are funding our summer in the Alps. And — ”
“ — And we decide to get jobs just for fun?”
Ava’s smile dims, and a sharp pain of regret for causing it cuts through Beatrice’s chest. Her remorse doesn’t show on her face — it never does — but the deep and burning need to step forward is harder to contain. (Ava encourages action in others, but Beatrice has always found herself particularly susceptible, despite — in spite of — her very nature.)
“Jobs? Like, job jobs? Like, what, you’re going to be an accountant or something?” The grin is back and it’s devastating. “Are you going to wake up every day at six and make coffee and eggs? Are you going to take a bus to the office and sit in a cubicle all day? Is our little closet going to be full of pant-suits? Because I gotta say; you could totally pull that off, but I don’t think anyone is buying me as the corporate type.”
The thought of Ava in a suit is enough to leave Beatrice without much of a clever retort, so she sticks to the truth instead. One day, this habit will get her in trouble, but she hasn’t figured out a way around it yet other than silence, something that was just as much of a liability in current company.
“I was thinking we would stick to the small bar down the street. There was a sign in the window promoting open positions.” Her tone turns droll, though too much fondness leaks through to keep it so for long. “I don’t think you’ll have much trouble with people ‘buying you’ as the bartending type.”
Ava’s eyes squint, still dangerously playful in intent, especially when she leans in. “Not totally sure what you mean by that, but I’m pretty sure it could be an insult, coming from you.”
“It’s not.”
She’s too quick, too earnest, and Ava’s expression slips into something far too soft. She knows, Beatrice thinks (always thinks), and ducks her head, stepping further into the apartment to avoid the stare. The floors are wooden and scratched and uneven, planks misaligned in places. Mary — who had once fixed a wobbly set of chairs in Beatrice’s room at the convent — would know what to do here. And probably (definitely) in ways more significant than improving the state of their new flat.
“Alright then, I guess I’m sold.” Ava is suddenly closer than she should be, shoulder knocking against Beatrice’s as she comes to stand at her side. It’s enough to break through the melancholy of missing someone who would offer advice Beatrice isn’t yet ready to hear. “We get part-time jobs at the bar, train a lot, and then go kick Adriel’s ass. I can think of worse ways to spend a month.”
In the empty apartment, Ava’s voice echoes slightly, no furniture or carpet or rugs to keep the surprising sincerity from resonating around the room. She finds much of the same in Ava’s face, peering at the peeling wallpaper of the bedroom with a strange contentment.
“How odd, given that you equated this plan to ‘swimming into a catfish hole and waiting to be noddled’, which — ”
“ — Which would have sounded really smart if any of you people educated yourselves with various important wildlife documentaries like Hillbilly Handfishin’. ”
“ — Which seemed to indicate you thought this was, in fact, one of the worst ways to spend a month,” Beatrice continues, finding contentment of her own in Ava’s resulting scoff, in the toss of her recently-sheared hair.
“You know why I said that and it had nothing to do with spending a month alone with you.” She nudges Beatrice again, this time with a gentle elbow. “I like spending time with you. And I like that this is ours.”
The heart is deceitful above all things, this Beatrice has read, has prayed, has thought she understood. But knowledge has little to do with the way hers throbs when Ava smiles with one corner of her lips and says the word ours.
“Despite our meager budget?” she questions, too lightly.
“Even with the Church being super fucking cheap, yeah.” Ava returns her gaze to the emptiness, and in her eyes Beatrice can see the world to come, narrowed down to a desolate room in a small apartment in a tiny town in the middle of the Swiss Alps. “We fight demons, Bea. We save the world. I think the two of us can manage to make a home.”
—
Home, to Ava, is flannel-backed chairs and worn quilts and lacy placemats and a rocking chair they find abandoned on the side of the road.
Home, to Beatrice, is Ava’s hand in her own as she drags Beatrice through the kitschy home store four towns over and Ava’s shout of triumph when she finds a matching set of salt and pepper shakers and Ava’s waggling eyebrows when they buy the bed that she (again) calls ours.
Home is also, it turns out, Beatrice hurriedly shutting their new curtains (built of the thickest fabric they could find) so no one notices Ava changing one of the lightbulbs in the crooked chandelier hanging in the middle of the room; a mundane task made less so by the fact that she’s levitating.
“I told you we didn’t need a ladder,” Ava calls down cheerfully.
“You say this as though you’ve convinced me otherwise.”
Finished with her original task, Ava winks and twirls around in place, an aerial pirouette that spins light around the room, bathing Beatrice’s face in the holy glow for a fleeting moment. It’s enough to stop her breath (because it always is), but it’s the halo flickering out — or, more accurately, Ava plunging to the ground — that stops her heart. Logic catches up with Beatrice quickly (the fall isn’t a long one and Ava can handle much worse), but by the time it does, she’s already moved without it. Three quick steps and she’s across the room, ready for the catch as Ava slams into the floor and stumbles, arms curled and knees braced.
Ava’s laugh hits her first, breathless and delighted, but then it’s the warmth under Beatrice’s palm, pressed firmly into Ava’s back, halo extinguished but leaving a heavy heat behind. The rest of it crashes into her at once (Ava’s cheek sliding against hers, wayward strands of brown tickling against her nose, the press of her calloused fingers against Ava’s bare hip, her shirt shifting just enough — too much — with the fall.)
“Point taken, I guess,” Ava says, humor still clearly present, saturating the words. “But, ooh, new joke; how many Warrior Nuns does it take to change a lightbulb?”
Beatrice groans. She groans because the joke is bad and Ava isn’t moving away and she’s moving closer, actually, her fingertips dancing up Beatrice’s bicep and it’s so much, already so much, even on day one. She groans because she knows Ava will only see the first of these reasons, and it’s in this simple mercy that Beatrice still finds God’s favor, even in the midst of His worst test.
“Okay, fine, party pooper. No punchline for you.” Ava straightens, slipping from Beatrice’s grasp with an ease that feels as impossible as anything else the woman manages on a daily basis. And then, more of the same: she slides back in with the same lack of difficulty and presses her lips to Beatrice’s jaw, just below the ear. “But thanks. For making sure I didn’t fall.”
You did though, Beatrice wants to say, but can’t explain (not even to herself) why the distinction is important, and remains silent, careful and blinking as she rolls her shoulders back with a steadying inhale.
This is not a choice.
The searing brand of Ava’s mouth has reduced her to autonomic functions alone: to breath and heart and sweat.
“I didn’t think I was running so low,” Ava continues, and when Beatrice’s eyes follow her movements, this is autonomous too, a rewiring of her nervous system that connects her to Ava without the requirement of thought. “But I guess I did spend the whole day using it. What with the couch and the bed and the incident with those salt and pepper shakes being so high up, I mean, come on, do they just not want people to buy their stuff? And yeah, I know, I hear you. Ladders. But what? I’m supposed to go find some poor sap who’d rather just be chilling behind the counter and make them drag over a ladder so that I can climb up the shelves and decide that yeah, maybe I do want to spend a single franc on some shitty wooden salt and pepper shakers?”
Ava pauses, if only to take a breath, but in the brief silence, Beatrice’s lack of response is apparent enough that she lifts her brow, a question in the gesture and the sudden slant of her lips.
“Three francs,” she blurts, a terrible deflection based on literally every metric (and the main one that matters: the laughter bubbling up in Ava’s eyes before the sound finds release). “They… were three francs.”
“Oh, well then!” The laugh slips out then, low and throaty in a way that would have Beatrice thinking once again about the feel of Ava’s lips on her skin, if only she had — at any point — stopped thinking about it. (And she most certainly hasn’t.) “Excuse the fuck out of me! I’m basically setting our money on fire, then! Three francs. Damn!”
“I didn’t mean to pass moral judgment on the purchase, merely provide clarification on the amount.”
Worse and worse. Never has Beatrice’s brain failed her in such a spectacular way. Outside of the forty-two other instances of Ava doing something similarly careless and earth shattering, of course. Not that Beatrice has been counting. Or mentally compiling a spreadsheet with columns to account for the numeric scale of devastation, the number of seconds it’d taken Beatrice to recover, and —
A sharp rap to the center of her forehead jolts her out of the spiral, the knuckle of Ava’s index finger knocking something loose, or maybe that’s her smile, half-amused, half-concerned.
“And I meant to make a joke. I’m not so uncool that you can’t tell anymore, am I? I’m posing as a broke uni student; my humor is the only thing I have going for me if I have to stick to that backstory.”
Now faced with Ava full-on — with her crooked little grin and the thinly veiled worry settled deep in the dark of her eyes — finally, a response comes easily.
“You know very well that’s not true.”
(How lovely it feels to release a sentiment based in nothing but truth, to not hide any double-meanings behind them, not even from herself.)
“Yeah, yeah, I’m a catch no matter what identity I’m using.” Ava’s hand hasn’t drifted all the way back down, and it jerks back up now, settling along Beatrice’s elbow, cradling the bend. “Are you okay though? That drop was like, two feet, so I honestly wasn’t even being reckless for once, so… You’re not mad, are you?”
Beatrice shakes her head, afraid (for just a moment) to trust words once again.
“No. Of course not. Though… you could show a little more care in making sure no one spots you from the outside. If I’m being particular about it.”
“You? Particular?” But Ava’s teasing again, worry released as quickly as it’d come. It’s easier to breathe when the earnestness is gone, though the playful side of Ava is hardly without its own risks (this Beatrice knows well, despite how often she forgets). “Honestly, I’m surprised we made it out of those shops without any of those little desk organizer things. Or like… a chore wheel.”
“I… ” Briefly, Beatrice considers lying. Ava, as though guessing she might, bites lightly at her bottom lip, holding back a full grin. “I did look,” she admits.
“You looked,” Ava repeats, an overload of fondness in her tone and look, enough of it to relax Beatrice once again.
“Tidy room, tidy mind,” she says, just to hear Ava laugh.
(She gets it, too: a loud and unrestrained snort.)
“When Southern Living does an issue on nuns, they’re really going to hit the jackpot with you, Bea. Remember me when you’re famous?”
Playful brings its own risk. She’d only just reminded herself, but forgets again, leaning in with ease, without any of the care she should take when Ava’s tone is conspiratorial. Or, worse, when she’s close enough to eliminate the need for steps to bridge the space between them.
“Of course. I’ll mention you in every interview I’m asked about handling messy roommates.”
“Hey!” Ava gaps, mock offended and not at all pulling it off. “You don’t know that I’m messy yet!”
“And yet you say that instead of if,” she tsks. “And I saw your room at the Cat’s Cradle.”
“That — ” Her finger lifts, in preparation of a great counterpoint, and then immediately falls again. “ — Is fair. But! Also! I didn’t have a lot of time for tidying, okay? I don’t know if you noticed, but there was a lot of demand for the Warrior Nun while I was there.”
“An interesting claim, given that I so often came across you sulking around the back hallways. Seems like someone would have come to find you before then, with you being in such high demand.”
With the taste of near-victory, she forgets to worry about the signs: the lift of Ava’s chin, the softening of her eyes, the dimming of her smile until it’s a quiet thing (a sigh of warm, dry air before a storm). And then the gentle touch; a brush against Beatrice’s side, catching more fabric than form, but still more than enough.
“Maybe I just only ever wanted to be found by you.”
Beatrice sucks in a breath and hopes it’s not audible. Blinking up at her with innocence, Ava gives little to no indication that it had been.
“You… aren’t adding any proof to your claim, you know,” she hazards, reaching behind her for the safe ground they’ve already skidded past. “About not being messy.”
“Eh, come on, Bea. At this point, we both know that’s a debate I’m not going to win. All I can do now is be incredibly endearing in the hopes that you let it go.” She blinks again, head tilting a bit further, exposing the long muscle of her neck, which Beatrice fights not to follow the downwards path of. “Is it working?”
It is very obviously working and if Beatrice is fooling anyone (Ava or herself) with her thin response, it’s a miracle of a magnitude people might write about.
“Not at all.”
Still, Ava holds her gaze for another moment more before the tension breaks, a rush of wind when Ava throws her head back and laughs, slapping her hands together once and spinning away. Her departure brings air that Beatrice can breathe without any particular strain; breath brings oxygen, oxygen brings thought, thought brings logic, and logic settles her.
And yet.
Relief, she has to remind herself. You feel relief.
“Guess I’ll have to work a little harder, then,” Ava says cheerfully, collapsing back onto the couch, briefly losing her joviality when the piece of furniture (old and cheap and the best they could get) groans with the newly added weight.
But only briefly, because this is Ava, and Ava treasures the small moments that others so easily miss. This time, it’s in her smile as she strokes her fingers along the worn flannel of the cushions. Beatrice sees the pride of ownership in her expression, and can’t imagine how anyone could ever call such light a sin. These are not thoughts she can share. So instead, she will tease, sharpening her affection into something a bit more bearable for them both.
“Sitting on the couch and doing nothing is a commendable start. Truly, I applaud you.”
Ava rewards her with a roll of her eyes. “Oh, ha-ha-hilarious. But no. If you’ll just chill and give me a second and — okay, actually, can you just sit? You standing over me with your arms crossed and your buttons all buttoned and your twisty little bun makes me feel like I’ve been sent to the principal’s office, or whatever. And while you can actually kind of really pull that off, I’m more of a positive reinforcement girl, in all aspects, so this isn’t my thing? I don’t think. Probably? I mean, not that it’s not — nevermind. Can you just sit?”
Approximately 25% of these words make any sort of sense to Beatrice, but, frankly, she’s a bit too distracted by the curious flush creeping up Ava’s neck as she says them. It starts somewhere under the low collar of her shirt, vanishes underneath her hair, curls around the shell of her ear, and persists even as Ava busies herself with reaching for her backpack from where she’d haphazardly tossed it sometime hours ago. If Beatrice had eons, she might continue to watch that spread of pink, might chart its eventual retreat, but time is limited and Ava asks and so she sits.
“Right. Better. Okay. I was thinking about this earlier, actually,” Ava begins with a deep inhale, pulling her bag into her lap and all but sticking her head inside as she roots around. “Because yes, maybe in the past I haven’t exactly been focused on putting my clothes in a laundry basket. And for good reason, I think! But you’re… you. So I’ve been thinking about it and I’m willing and able to prove to you that I am ready to take responsibility. I’m ready to take action. I am ready to make a change in my life. I am — holy fuck where is this fucking thing, I swear to Christ I am — ”
“— Having a lot of trouble with the lack of organization in your backpack?”
“No.” Beatrice lifts a brow. It’s all the push Ava needs to quickly correct herself; a surprisingly easy victory. “Okay, yes. But. If you’ll just give me like — just a second, I will be ready to prove to you that I am — a ha!”
With a triumphant cry, Ava pulls something from the bag, holding it up above her head like a character out of a video game. With all the hullabaloo, Beatrice might expect something made of pure gold, but it’s Ava, so she’s not particularly surprised when, instead, it’s a pad of paper with a cartoon frog eating a slice of cake in the bottom corner.
“To-do-Liste,” she reads — German accent exaggerated — with one of those trademark Ava grins (the ones that Beatrice can always feel as much as see). “Pretty sure they borrowed that one.”
“You bought a to-do list,” Beatrice realizes, slow on the uptake because of everything (because of every part of it). “Today? For… me?”
“For us.” The correction is light and so is Ava’s expression, but hits like a fall onto concrete, knocking all of the breath from her lungs. “I figured that you might like things a little ‘tidier’ than me, but that stuff doesn’t come super naturally to me because — well — I don’t really remember ever doing it. But if you tell me what I should be doing, then I’ll do it! I’ll even write it down myself on this little froggie list. My — ah — penmanship could use some work anyways.”
Beatrice had long ago learned that there were people in her life who cared. Cautiously, she’d opened herself to gentle touches and whispered secrets and little moments of kindness from the sisters she’d grown to love. She had learned, slowly, that she was allowed these things. But gifts were hard. Gifts held expectations, came with strings, never had been offered freely during the years most likely to leave the deepest scars.
“What do you think?” Enthusiasm unaffected by Beatrice’s silence, Ava waggles the notepad in front of her. “Want me as your official chore scribe?”
Gifts came with a catch. Except, perhaps, when they came from Ava, who had never really asked her for anything at all.
“You could use the practice,” she murmurs, finally, and there’s that grin again, bright enough to be holy. “And the frog is quite cute.”
Without a table to use, Ava makes a show of setting the to-do list against the plane of her thigh, setting in with a shimmy and sliding a finger up the bridge of her nose.
“I’m putting on my imaginary glasses,” she explains, stupidly, cheesily, charmingly. “Get ready, Bea, because I’m about to become the best scribe/roommate you’ve ever had.”
—
Several hours later, Beatrice knows that this was, perhaps, the greatest lie any person has ever uttered since the dawn of mankind.
The scribe bit works well enough; Ava writes in slow, careful strokes, her tongue sticking out as she forms letters she hasn’t used in more than a decade, and Beatrice watches, a weight on her chest that feels a certain kind of pleasant. They bicker over chore division, Ava makes a joke about maid costumes, Beatrice manages not to blush, and after all of it, they pin the list to the fridge, using a magnetic bottle opener that Ava had (ominously) promised would come in handy earlier on in the day.
But then it’s bedtime and Beatrice is offering to sleep on the couch and Ava is laughing like it’s a joke and not a plea and then they’re in bed together and then Ava is the worst roommate she’s ever had — the worst roommate by far — because they could only fit a double bed in the room and every time Ava shifts, some part of her brushes up against some part of Beatrice and whenever it does, Beatrice knows that Hell exists and she has found it.
This time, it’s Ava rolling over onto her side; one of her legs stretches out to help with the motion and then it’s skin on skin, Ava’s foot sliding along Beatrice’s calf, stroking upwards and then — when Beatrice begins to feel lightheaded, when she realizes she’s been holding her breath all this while — peeling away, as quickly as it’d come. For a brief, blissful moment, she’s free from torment. And then it’s Ava flipping onto her stomach, one arm flailing out and brushing against Beatrice’s chest; it’s her knee pulling in and rubbing along Beatrice’s hip bone; it’s the puff of air that slips from her lips and fills the space between them.
Tonight, she’d prayed for the strength to withstand temptation, but she’d forgotten one of her earliest Church lessons in the process. God, a kindly priest had once told her, does not simply give us the traits we pray for. He puts us into situations that will help us develop those qualities ourselves, through hard work and time and patience.
At the time, Beatrice — sixteen and desperate to be anyone other than herself — had taken comfort in those words. Now, she’s starting to think that maybe God, in all His infinite wisdom, simply didn’t know when to quit.
She, however, most certainly does.
“Ava?” she whispers. “I’m going to — ”
She’d hoped that Ava was merely an especially active sleeper, that she wouldn’t hear Beatrice as she begged retreat. But God didn’t know when to quit, and so Ava’s hand darts out and finds Beatrice’s wrist in the dark, fingers curling around and pressing into skin with the strength of the mostly conscious.
“Ugh, no, don’t. I’ll stop fucking around. I’m just — shit — I’m sorry.”
At night, their sleepy Swiss town shuts down. There are no lamps that remain lit past midnight, no cars that drive through on an overnight commute, no last-call drunks to stumble by with their phone flashlights on. This is not a surprise — they’d chosen the place for its remoteness, after all — but it does make observing Ava’s expression impossible, without a trace of ambient light to creep beyond their curtains and highlight the planes of her face.
“It’s alright,” Beatrice murmurs, gentle and lighthearted in the face of Ava’s unexpected frustration. “Clearly I should have allotted more of the budget towards our mattress. I admit that this one is somehow less comfortable than the ones found in most convents, which is quite a feat.”
Typically, this weak attempt at a joke would garner a pity chuckle from Ava, at the very least, but tonight it falls flat, leaving silence in its wake.
“It’s not that,” Ava says finally. “It’s — um — it’s stupid. Well, not stupid, but — ”
With another huff of frustration, Ava releases her, twisting onto her side once more. Beatrice, traitorous to herself or stupid or a sucker for punishment, immediately craves the thing she’d been trying to escape, but pushes past the disappointment with a fair amount of ease, concern burying most anything else.
“You don’t have to explain. Just tell me how to help.”
Somehow, it’s this that gets the laugh. Not one born out of pity, but — if the softness of it is anything to go by — affection. Before she can second-guess the assessment, Ava’s hand returns, palm laying atop Beatrice’s forearm with a new gentleness.
“You do,” Ava promises, overly tender here too. “You are. I’m just — I’m used to sleeping on my back. But I don’t… want to anymore.”
This is not something they talk about often, if at all. If Beatrice has her way, they won’t talk about it now either, because she doesn’t have to see Ava’s face to know that there’s pain etched in every line of it. She’s been told there’s healing to be found in discussions such as these, but has never managed to have much success with the concept. Action is easier, in her experience, even in the most extreme of cases.
“I see,” she murmurs.
“Do you?” Ava’s voice cracks with the effort to shift into a lighter tone. “I mean, it’s pretty fucking dark in here, so…”
“I understand,” she corrects, but that’s not quite right either. “That is, I know how to help.”
“I already told you; you are. You always are. You’re here and you’re — ” With a deep breath, Ava cuts herself off. “Look, it’s not a big deal. It’s just something I’m getting used to. But I’m sure it’s really fucking annoying to have me yanking the covers around every two seconds, so if anyone’s going to the couch, it’s me.”
Ava goes so far as to remove her hand, which is, frankly, unacceptable. (Nevermind Beatrice’s feelings on the matter only minutes ago.)
“No one is going to the couch.” She’s firm, at least for the first bit, but the reality of what she’s offering catches up with her in the second, slowing her words. “What if… you remain on your back, in the position your body — despite your best efforts — prefers to remain in as you fall asleep, and I will… help you remember that things are not as they were.”
A puff of laughter hits her face, turned towards Ava in a way that brings to mind flowers and sun.
“Oh, sure. Easy as that, huh? Don’t tell me you have hypnosis tucked away with your other seven thousand trillion talents, or whatever. Right next to aikido and Latin and probably knitting, or some shit like th— ”
Before she can think better of it, Beatrice shifts forward, quick and fluid. Her palm strikes out and flattens against Ava’s chest, pressing against it with enough force to push her back down onto the mattress, effectively silencing her mid-word. (Absently, Beatrice files this away as a surprisingly effective tactic to get Ava to shut up.)
“Bea?”
Coming out of Ava’s mouth, her name pitches high in the latter part of the syllable, a strangled sort of question that does an odd thing to Beatrice’s pulse and stomach and breath, all of which she immediately ignores.
“Relax,” Beatrice murmurs, mostly to herself. “It’s not like it was.”
Slowly now — with far more care — she drapes her right leg over Ava’s and drops her head onto her chest. Ava is warm and small and twitching under Beatrice’s weight, but her hand comes up immediately, instinctively, and slides into the loose bun at the back of Beatrice’s neck.
“You feel me, yes?”
A few strands of brown slip out of the knot, tugged out of place by the twirl of Ava’s fingers. This isn’t meant as a comfort to Beatrice (if anything, it’s meant to be the opposite: a test, a penance, a marathon of faith), but she feels herself relax all the same, eyes slipping shut as Ava’s movements continue.
“I feel you,” Ava confirms, achingly soft.
“So go to sleep. I’ll be here. You’ll feel me. And you’ll know it’s not like before.”
Ava’s nod presses her lips to the crown of Beatrice’s head, her exhale tickles against the scalp. This is intimacy on a scale Beatrice has only ever experienced painful flashes of, and it would hurt if it weren’t Ava underneath her, tension slipping away with each passing moment.
“Should’ve known you’d be the best at this whole roommate thing, too.” In a sure sign of Ava’s exhaustion, there’s a drawl already slipping into her voice. “What can’t you do, Bea?”
Cross stitch or tap dance, Beatrice could say. Make a soufflé or carve a statue out of ice. But were she to swear on the Bible and saints, God and His angels, the only answer she might truthfully give is stop wanting you.
“Goodnight, Ava,” she says instead.
One day down, thirty or sixty or ninety or more left to go. It can’t last, but Ava hums as she settles into a prelude to sleep, and underneath all the things Beatrice ought to feel about the trials ahead, there’s a small kernel of happiness, steady and true.