Meeting the wife

Lord Fitzgerald’s wife. The one person he, to his great shame, really didn’t want to ever meet. Seeing her in the flesh, he was always afraid, would make certain things feel way more real than he wanted them to be. He could push aside the knowledge that Fitzgerald had a wife who went insane after their daughter died, he could treat her like something imaginary, a ploy to garner sympathy, as long as she was somewhere across the ocean. He didn’t have to feel bad for her, or sympathise with Fitzgerald due to his loss. And similarly, if the wife was just a hypothetical person, he didn’t have to feel quite so bad about his crush on the man, a crush that developed into something else, more serious, more genuine, more romantic. They were here, and the wife, well, the wife was somewhere else.