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The wind had been wrong all afternoon, warm enough to loosen the surface of the snow and cold enough to punish any exposed skin once the sun dropped. By the time Riri and Sister Mary-Agnes finished their run, the road had become an uneven sequence of wet patches, refrozen edges and dark grit thrown up by passing vehicles. They walked the last half mile as they usually did, allowing their breathing to settle. Riri's shoes were damp around the toes. Mary-Agnes had mud flecked up the back of one leg. Neither looked particularly dignified, which made the conversation Riri had been rehearsing for two weeks feel even more impossible.
She had not decided to confess. That was the problem. A confession at least had a shape: words spoken, answer received, humiliation survived. What Riri wanted was somehow more dangerous and less clear. She wanted Mary-Agnes to know without forcing her to respond. She wanted acknowledgement without consequence. She wanted the relief of no longer pretending that her attachment was merely unusually enthusiastic respect, but she also wanted the relationship to remain exactly as it was. These desires could not all be satisfied, and Riri knew it. She had become better at recognizing contradictions without assuming recognition solved them.
Mary-Agnes had almost certainly understood for a long time. Riri could see that now when she looked backward. The absence of teasing, the refusal to encourage private confidences, the consistency of affection without emotional reciprocity were not accidental. At thirteen Riri had experienced Mary-Agnes's restraint as simply part of who she was. Now she could perceive the judgement inside it. That perception made her love Mary-Agnes with a new layer of gratitude and also made the need to say something feel faintly absurd. Perhaps the most important part had already been communicated in everything they had not said.
They reached the turnout where Evelyn would collect Riri later. The sky held a hard pale strip of evening above the trees. Mary-Agnes checked her watch and suggested they walk another ten minutes rather than stand cooling down. Riri agreed. They turned along the shoulder.
For the first several minutes they spoke about hockey. Riri's team had been changing systems, and she was frustrated by a coach who kept describing aggression as if it were automatically a virtue. Mary-Agnes asked what Riri meant by aggression. Riri said pressure, speed, physical commitment. Mary-Agnes asked whether those were the same thing. Riri told her she was doing that teacher thing again. Mary-Agnes replied that Riri had asked a teacher a question. The exchange was familiar enough to settle them both.
Then Riri said, "Do you think people can admire somebody too much?" The sentence sounded artificial the moment it existed. Mary-Agnes did not rescue her from it. She walked another few paces before answering that admiration could become a problem if it replaced judgement. Riri asked what if the person deserved it. Mary-Agnes said nobody deserved the surrender of another person's judgement.
Riri looked at the road. The conversation had already moved closer to its real subject than she intended. She said admiration was not the same as surrender. Mary-Agnes agreed. Attraction was not the same as admiration either, she added, and affection was not the same as either one. The words entered the space between them with such calm that Riri felt her entire body become aware of itself.
Mary-Agnes kept walking. Riri could have denied the relevance. She could have laughed, changed the subject or forced the confession through sheer stubbornness. Instead she listened. Mary-Agnes said people often experienced several kinds of feeling toward the same person and then tried to make one word explain all of them. Respect could exist beside attraction. Gratitude could be mistaken for love. Love could be real even when sharing a life was not possible. None of that made the feelings false. It did mean feelings alone were poor architects.
There was no lecture about inappropriate desire, no warning that Riri had crossed a line merely by feeling. Mary-Agnes did not say the word teacher. She did not say nun. She did not say age. She did not need to. The practical impossibility of the situation had been sitting beside them for years.
Riri asked what made sharing a life possible, then immediately wished she had chosen a less revealing question. Mary-Agnes answered as if the question belonged to anyone. Timing mattered. Freedom mattered. Reciprocity mattered. The ability to choose one another without one person's authority shaping the choice mattered. Affection was not enough to erase an unequal position. Good intentions were not enough either.
Riri understood every word and hated understanding them. She had never truly believed Mary-Agnes would reciprocate, but there remained a childish chamber inside the crush where impossibility had been protected from direct examination. Mary-Agnes had now opened the door without naming what was inside. The pain was sharp, then unexpectedly clean. Nothing had been taken away because nothing had been promised.
She said, after a while, that it sounded unfair. Mary-Agnes asked which part. Riri kicked a pebble of frozen grit off the road. "That something can be real and still not be possible." Mary-Agnes nodded. She said adulthood contained more of that than anyone would choose, and then, perhaps sensing how severe the answer sounded, added that impossibility did not make a feeling useless. People could learn from what they loved, provided they did not turn the object of love into a possession or a destiny.
Riri's throat tightened. She was grateful for the wind because it gave her eyes an excuse to water. They walked in silence. Mary-Agnes did not touch her. Riri noticed and was grateful for that too. A consoling hand on the shoulder might have felt wonderful and then become another moment Riri could overread for months. Mary-Agnes trusted her to bear the discomfort without converting restraint into coldness.
At the turn back, Riri finally said, "You know, then." It was the closest she came to a confession. Mary-Agnes's answer was gentle and almost maddeningly spare. "I know enough." Riri let out a breath that sounded close to a laugh. She looked at Mary-Agnes and found no pity there. That mattered more than anything. Mary-Agnes was not embarrassed for her. She was not flattered in a way that made Riri responsible for continuing the admiration. She was not frightened. Riri's feelings could be known and still remain hers.
They started back toward the turnout. The silence that followed was different from the one before. Riri had expected exposure to make every ordinary detail unbearable. Instead the road remained the road. Her damp socks remained irritating. A raven lifted from a utility pole. Mary-Agnes complained that the temperature had dropped faster than forecast. Riri told her she had warned her about the wind. Mary-Agnes said Riri had warned everyone within hearing distance about the wind because Riri enjoyed being right about weather.
The normality felt almost miraculous. Evelyn had not arrived yet when they returned, so they kept walking small loops near the parking area. Riri no longer felt compelled to finish the conversation, but questions remained. She asked whether attraction always faded if nothing came of it. Mary-Agnes said no. Riri asked if that was supposed to be encouraging. Mary-Agnes said it was supposed to be accurate.
That answer made Riri laugh properly. The laugh released some pressure from her chest. Accuracy was one of Mary-Agnes's forms of kindness. She did not tell Riri that the crush would vanish and someday become funny. She did not promise a future girlfriend who would make the whole thing irrelevant. She allowed the feeling to be large without allowing it to dictate reality.
Riri looked at her teacher then, really looked. Mary-Agnes's face was tired from the run, cheeks reddened by wind, a few loose dark strands visible where her head covering had shifted under the cold-weather layer. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes that Riri had begun noticing over the past year. She was not a timeless figure waiting at the centre of Riri's adolescence. She was a woman with a life already shaped by decisions made long before Riri entered it.
Strangely, that did not diminish desire. Riri still found her beautiful. She still wanted the impossible in the undisciplined part of herself. But another feeling grew around the wanting: respect for Mary-Agnes's right to remain entirely herself rather than become the answer to Riri's longing.
Evelyn's car appeared at the road. Riri felt a flash of panic that the conversation would be visible on her face. Mary-Agnes did not act differently. She greeted Evelyn, reported the route and mentioned the deteriorating surface. Evelyn looked at Riri once, a mother's glance that assessed more than temperature, then asked whether she had eaten since lunch. Riri said yes. The world had returned to practical questions.
In the car, Evelyn waited until they had driven several minutes before asking if the run had been all right. Riri said yes. The word came out thick enough that Evelyn glanced over. Riri stared through the windshield and said she and Mary-Agnes had talked about some things. Evelyn did not ask which things. She told Riri there was soup at home.
That restraint nearly made her cry more than the conversation had. Riri spent the evening in her room under the pretext of homework. She opened a history book, read the same paragraph three times and finally gave up. The old fantasy structure of the crush had shifted. She could no longer imagine that Mary-Agnes simply had not noticed, or that some undefined future change would make everything obvious and easy. She knew she was known. She knew the answer without having been rejected in the theatrical sense.
Pain came in waves, but so did relief. Riri did not have to perform indifference anymore. She also did not have to speak every feeling aloud in order for it to count as honest. There was dignity in mutual understanding that stopped before confession became demand.
At school the next morning, Mary-Agnes treated her exactly as she treated her the day before. Riri arrived half expecting some altered atmosphere. There was none. Mary-Agnes collected assignments, corrected a date on the board, asked another student to stop tapping a pencil, and returned Riri's essay with three comments in the margin. Riri's heart still changed rhythm when the paper reached her desk. Apparently clarity had not cured anything.
At lunch Tessa asked why she looked as though she had not slept. Riri told her she had been thinking. Tessa said that sounded dangerous. Riri gave her a look. Tessa did not press. Over the following weeks Riri discovered that being understood made her less rigid around Mary-Agnes. She no longer had to guard every glance as though one mistake would reveal the whole secret. The secret was gone, but the relationship remained. She could laugh when Mary-Agnes caught her staring out a window. She could disagree without feeling disagreement endangered affection. She could accept praise without spending the next day searching it for hidden meaning.
The crush did not disappear. In some ways it became more tender. Riri could now love Mary-Agnes without secretly assigning her the task of one day proving that love justified itself through reciprocity. That was not perfect maturity. Riri still had jealous flashes when another student received particular praise. She still sometimes wished she were older, or that circumstances were different, or that wishing itself had power. But she could recognize those thoughts as thoughts rather than plans.
A few weeks later they ran the same route under clearer weather. The road had dried at the edges, and the snowbanks had shrunk into grey walls. Riri paced herself automatically. Mary-Agnes did not mention March wind or the conversation beside it. Neither did Riri.
Near the first hill, a younger runner passed them too fast, breathing hard already. Riri watched him go and said he would regret that in ten minutes. Mary-Agnes asked how she knew. Riri replied that some people exhausted themselves for recreational purposes. Mary-Agnes looked at her. Riri smiled. Then they kept running.