Drabble: 'the deal that i'm making'

She’ll give him this: Robert de Vere is trying to do the decent thing for once in his life with regard to a woman. She sees his mouth go tight with pain when she’s near, and how he’ll scatter from her husband’s side the moment that she approaches, which is often. Both of them have the same rotten luck, only in the column for her own credit she’s married to the man she’s unbearably sick in love with, and for Robert de Vere’s he isn’t a thousand-odd miles from home, trapped among hostile foreigners and humiliatingly sterile. Quite the opposite.