Please Forget Me - Chapter 280

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

But I’m a woman, you know. My grandmother says men dislike women who assert themselves.
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That’s wonderful news. It means I’ll have fewer rivals. Please, continue to be a woman who speaks her mind, wherever you are.
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Good heavens. You really know how to make a woman’s heart flutter with a single sentence. You’re not a womanizer, are you?
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I’m not saying this to win your favor, it’s the truth. If my words made you flutter, then I flutter too.
You’re my first. That’s not a lie meant to charm you either, so please believe me.
This sort of attention must be nothing new to you, so it may not surprise you. I won’t deny that at first I was drawn to your appearance, just like the other boys before me. But the more I learn about your inner self, the more I like you.
So please, tell me more of what you think. Aren’t you curious how deeply I might come to like you?
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All right. Then I’ll tell you something you might not like very much.

We spoke at length about what it meant to be feminine. You, too, were weary of being forced into a version of femininity that denied you as a human being. Your conservative grandmother was the root of it.

I want to be a complete person, but my grandmother wants me to become someone’s appendage, my husband’s. Honestly, a husband! I’m only fourteen.
I’m a steel marble that rolls just fine on its own, yet they want to hammer and shave me down into a cog and shove me into a huge machine. You understand how infuriating and despairing that feels, don’t you? You might be disappointed that I’m speaking ill of my elders.
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Miss Loveridge, there may be no one who understands your anger and despair better than I do. And when it comes to speaking ill of elders, I can more than hold my own. I consider my father a hypocrite. He uses ‘girlish’ as an insult, yet claims his wife is the person he respects most in the world.

We were oppressed teenagers. Sharing our grievances against adults, we quickly became allies.

I wanted to become a doctor, like my father.

One day, you spoke of a dream you had already been forced to abandon.

When I said that once, my grandmother tried to pull me out of school and hire a private tutor instead. She said school was corrupting me…. After that, I never spoke of it again.
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Does Dr. Loveridge oppose it as well? If my child said they wanted to follow in my footsteps, I’d be proud.
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I think my father feels the same. But he can’t stand up to my grandmother. And besides, he’s more occupied with his own future than with mine.

Your dream was nothing like the rumors, that you were obsessively training day and night to become a proper noblewoman. The world was blinded by prejudice, your family by their own ambitions. The more I learned, the lonelier you seemed.

I don’t want you to give up on your dream.

I didn’t want you—already so lonely—to become utterly alone without even a dream. Perhaps it was my own final resistance speaking, having had the chance to dream stolen from me long ago.

Together, we began to discuss how you might overcome your grandmother’s opposition and your father’s indifference to attend medical school. Like all naïve teenagers, our plans were reckless and wildly unrealistic.

Miss Loveridge… then what about marriage?

At least that part was somewhat realistic.

You’d have to leave the Loveridge household to attend medical school. We both agreed on that.
It may not appeal to you, but realistically, marriage is the only way for you to leave your family. You would marry a man who supports—and welcomes—your pursuit of medicine.

I couldn’t bring myself to say that man was me. I already believed you had rejected me.

If you become a doctor, I suppose I can come to you whenever I fall ill.

And then you said something that made my heart stumble.

Um… only if you’re capable of becoming pregnant. I want to be an obstetrician. Don’t be disappointed. Perhaps one day I’ll be the one to deliver your child.

I wished that child were already ours.

And I could help your wife as well, if she were ill.

From those words, I thought you had gently drawn a line that we could be friends, but never lovers.