Agnelette's Wedding

"You've changed," Agnelette said, the first time she saw him after his sudden new prosperity, watching him from across the village square with an unease she couldn't yet name properly.

"I've improved. There's a difference."

"Is there? You used to want a slightly better position, a slightly easier living. This isn't that anymore. This looks like wanting everything, all at once, and not particularly caring what it costs to get it."

He laughed at that, though the laugh didn't reach the rest of his face the way it used to. "You've always worried too much, Agnelette."

"I've always known you. That's different from worrying."

She'd carried a quiet hope for years that their childhood closeness might eventually become something more, and she watched that hope recede a little further with each new sign of his troubling transformation, not the prosperity itself, which she might have been glad of on his behalf, but the particular hungry quality it had brought with it, an ambition that no longer seemed to have any actual destination beyond simply more.

"Are you happy?" she asked him once, plainly, with more courage than her usual reserve typically allowed her.

He didn't answer immediately, and when he did, the answer troubled her more than an outright no would have. "I don't know anymore what happy would even look like. I'm not sure it's still available to me, whatever I've gotten instead."

"Then what was the whole bargain actually for?"

"Don't ask me that." He said it quickly, almost sharply, in a way that told her more than any direct answer could have.

She didn't yet understand the actual shape of what he'd traded, or with whom, or for what specific terms. She understood only, watching him with the plain clarity of someone who'd known him her whole life, that whatever he'd gained had cost him something she suspected mattered a great deal more, and that he'd lost some part of himself she couldn't yet name but could feel the absence of every time she looked at him now.

"I still think there's something left of the boy I grew up with," she told her mother, one evening, when the whole village had begun whispering about Thibault's strange new fortune.

"You think that because you want to think it."

"Maybe. I'd rather keep believing it a little longer than give up on him the way everyone else already has." Agnelette said this quietly, without much conviction left to spare, and went on, in the months that followed, offering him whatever small counsel and whatever small affection he remained willing to accept: a quiet vigil kept less out of remaining hope than out of a stubborn refusal to abandon the boy she'd once known before she was entirely certain there was nothing left of him to save.