“You know I’ve only ever been with Aaron. And I think you know that what we do together goes way beyond what you said. What’s wrong with you?”

Gabriel muttered an apology and refused to make eye contact. But his warning shot across the bow had accomplished what he wished it to, and that was to divert her attention from one of her questions. So he felt no remorse. Not really.

Rachel toyed with her brother’s business card for a moment as she tried to calm down.

“If you don’t like Julia, then you must feel sorry for her. Why? Is it just because she’s poor?”

“I don’t know.” He sighed and shook his head.

“Julia brings out the protective side in people. She was always a little sad and a little lost. Although make no mistake, she has steel in her bones.

She survived an alcoholic mother and a boyfriend who…”

Gabriel’s blue eyes shifted to hers with interest. “Who?” he prompted.

“You said you didn’t want to know about her personal life. It’s too bad, really. If you and she weren’t in a professional relationship, you might have liked her. You might have been friends.”

She smiled at him, testing the waters, but Gabriel kept his eyes on the breakfast bar and began rubbing his chin absently.

Rachel drummed her fingers on the countertop. “Do you want me to tell her the briefcase and the shoes are from you?”

“Of course not! I could get fired for that. Someone will jump to the wrong conclusion, and I’ll be hauled in before the judicial committee.”

“I thought you were tenured.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered.

“So you want to spend all of this money on Julia, and you don’t care if she knows that they gifts are from you? It’s a bit like Cyrano de Bergerac, don’t you think? I guess your French is better than I thought.”

He stood up, effectively ignoring her, and walked over to the large espresso machine on one of the counters. He began the somewhat laborious process of making the perfect espresso, keeping his back to his annoying sister.

She sighed. “All right. You want to do something nice for Julia. You can call it penance, if you like, but maybe it’s just kindness. And it’s doubly kind, because you want to do it in secret and not embarrass her or make her feel like she owes you something. I’m impressed. Sort of.”

“I want her petals to open,”  Gabriel breathed softly.

Rachel dismissed his admission as incoherent mumbling, because she couldn’t believe that he’d said what she in fact heard. It was too bizarre.

“Don’t you think you should treat Julia as an adult and tell her the gifts are from you? Let her make her own decision about whether she should accept them or not?

“She wouldn’t accept them if she knew they were from me. She hates me.”

Rachel laughed. “Julia is not the type of girl to hate people. She’s far too forgiving for that. Although if she hates you, you probably deserve it.

But you’re right — she doesn’t accept charity. She would never let me buy things for her except on very special occasions.”

“Then tell her it’s for a backlog of Christmas presents from you. Or tell her it’s from Grace.” A meaningful look passed between the siblings.

Rachel’s eyes filled with tears. “Mom was the only person Julia would accept charity from, because she thought of Mom as her mother.”

Gabriel was at her side in an instant and wrapped her in his arms, trying to comfort her as best he could.

In his heart, he knew exactly what he was doing by persuading his sister to buy some pretty, girlish things for Miss Mitchell. He was paving hell with energy — buying an indulgence, forgiveness for sin. He’d never reacted this way to a woman before. But no, Gabriel wouldn’t indulge himself with that line of thought. That would serve no purpose, no purpose at all.

He knew he lived in hell. He accepted it. He rarely complained. But truth be told, he desperately wished he could make his escape. Unfortunately, he had no Virgil and no Beatrice to come to his aid. His prayers went unanswered, and his plans for reform were almost always thwarted by something or other. Usually a woman wearing four-inch heels and long blond hair, who would scratch long fingernails down his back while screaming his name, over and over and over again…

Given his current state of affairs, the best that he could do to reform himself would be to take the old man’s blood money and lavish it on a brown-eyed angel. An angel who couldn’t afford an apartment with a kitchen, and who would blossom a little when her best friend gave her a pretty dress and a new pair of shoes.

Gabriel wanted to do more than buy her a briefcase, although he would never admit what he truly wanted; he wanted to make Julianne smile.

While the siblings were discussing penance, forgiveness, and ridiculous abominations of book bags, Paul was waiting for Julia just outside the entrance to Robarts Library, the largest on the campus of the University of Toronto. Although Julia could only guess at this, in the short time in which he had known her Paul had grown quite fond of her.

He was used to having lots of friends, many of them women. And he’d dated his share of both well-adjusted and troubled girls. His most recent relationship had run its course. Allison wanted to stay in Vermont, and be a schoolteacher. He wanted to move to Toronto and study to become a professor. After two years of a long distance relationship, it was not meant to be.

But there was no malice — no slashing of tires or burning of photographs.

They were friends, even, and Paul was proud of that fact.

But now that Paul had met Rabbit, he began to appreciate how a relationship with someone with whom he shared common interests and common career goals could be very exciting and very fulfilling.

Paul was old-fashioned. He believed in courting a woman. He believed in taking his time. And so he was perfectly content only to build a friendship with the beautiful and shy Rabbit until he knew her well enough to express his feelings. And until he was confident of her regard for him. He was determined to spend time with her and treat her properly and pay her a lot of attention, so that if someone else came along in the meantime and tried to muscle in on him, he’d be close enough to tell that individual to back the fuck off.

Julia was sorry that she would miss out on shopping with Rachel, but she’d already promised Paul that she would spend the day with him at the library. She needed to get started on her thesis proposal now that Professor Emerson had agreed to be her supervisor. She felt more than a strong motivation to perform well in his class and to dazzle him with her proposal, although she knew based upon his previous behavior that she was likely to do neither.

“Hi.” Paul greeted her warmly and immediately slipped her heavy knapsack off her shoulder and transferred it to his. He barely felt its weight on his massive shoulder.

Julia smiled up at him, relieved to be unburdened for a little while.

“Thanks for agreeing to be my guide. The last time I was in here I got lost. I ended up in an obscure section on the fourth floor that was entirely devoted to maps.” She shivered.

Paul laughed. “It’s a huge library. I’ll show you the Dante collection on the ninth floor and take you to my office.”

He held the door open for her, and Julia floated by, feeling very much like a princess. Paul had excellent manners, and he did not use them as a weapon. Julia considered how some people, who-would-not-be-named, used manners to intimidate and to control, while others, like Paul, used them to honor and to make others feel special. Very special, indeed.

“You have an office?” she asked, as they flashed their student id cards at the security guard who sat by the elevators.

“Sort of.” He held the elevator door open, waiting for Julia to enter before he joined her. “My study carrel is next to the Dante section.”

“Can I apply for a carrel?”

Paul grimaced. “They’re like gold. It’s almost impossible to get one, especially as an MA student.”

He read the question in her eyes and hastened to add, “I think MA students are just as important as PhD students. But there aren’t enough carrels to go around. The one I have isn’t even mine — it’s Emerson’s.”

If Paul hadn’t allowed Julia to push the button for the ninth floor, he would have seen her skin turn slightly green and heard her sharp intake of breath. But he didn’t.

Once they arrived on the ninth floor, he patiently guided her through the Dante collection, showing her both the primary and secondary sources.

And he watched with delight as she trailed her hand across the spines of the books lovingly, as if she were greeting old friends.

“Julia, would you mind if I asked you a personal question?”

She stood very still, fingering a quarto  volume that had a tattered leather binding. She inhaled its scent deeply to keep herself calm and nodded.

“Emerson asked me to pull your file from Mrs. Jenkins and — ”

She turned her head to face him, eyes large and unblinking.  Oh no, she thought.

He held his hands up to reassure her. “I didn’t read it. Don’t worry.”

He chuckled softly. “There’s nothing too personal in those files anyway.

Apparently, he wanted to remove something he’d put in there. But it was what he did afterward that surprised me.”

Julia raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to spit it out.

“He telephoned Greg Matthews, the chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard.”

She blinked slowly as she reflected on what he said. “How do you know?”

“I was dropping off some photocopying, and I overheard Emerson on the telephone. He was asking Matthews about you.”

“Why would he do that?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you. He demanded to know why they didn’t have generous enough funding for their MA students. He’s an alumnus of that department, you know. Matthews was the chair when he completed his PhD.”

Holy shit. He was checking up on me? Of course. He wouldn’t believe I actually got into Harvard, just like him.  Julia closed her eyes, her fingers clutching the bookshelf for support.

“I couldn’t hear everything that Matthews was saying. But I heard Emerson.”

She kept her eyes closed and waited for the other shoe to drop. She only hoped that Paul would drop it quickly and not directly on her toes.

“I didn’t know that you got into Harvard, Julia. That’s pretty amazing.

Emerson asked if you’d really been accepted into their program and how highly you were ranked in their admissions pool.”

“Of course,” she mumbled. “I’m from a small town in Pennsylvania.

I went to a Jesuit university of about seven thousand students. How could I get into Harvard?”

Paul frowned. Poor Rabbit. That sick fucker really did a number on her.

I should seriously kick his ass. And then I should go to work on him…

“What’s wrong with Catholic schools? I did my undergrad at St. Mike’s in Vermont, and I got a great education. They had a Dante specialist in the English Department and a Florentine specialist in History.”