Perhaps he’d tell her he saw a bird rarer than she was. Or better, he could call her an old bird in relation to the rare one. He missed the way she used to pinch his ear when he got impertinent.
He stepped out into the mist with his hands in his pockets. This inn had the lovely features of doors that led directly outside, without the necessity of cutting through the dining hall. All the same, he was forced to see people who were also awake at this ungodly hour, and likely out of habit due to their vocations.
He nodded to a stablemaster. He sidestepped a girl churning butter. He convinced himself that he was the most tragic figure here, despite knowing damn well that he’d never have to rise early at anyone’s behest but his own.
His boots sank into the marshy ground, saturated with streams so tiny that the naked eye could not appreciate them. Above, a murmuration of starlings burst from a tree, moving in a great black cloud in one direction, then another, before vanishing over the horizon.
In the distance, he could see great shadows. Deer, perhaps? Or horses out to graze.
It smelled good out here. It smelled like loam and sweet water. It wasn’t the Cornish coast, but it was all right, after all. Good, even.
He walked for a long time, long enough that the sun wasn’t shrouded anymore by the time he headed back. It was naked, the mist fully shaken off, and beating down on the top of his head, reminding the world that it still had heat, even if it had been tempering it for the first half of the year. It promised more, even in its restraint.
Mercifully, Ember and Joe were both already seated for breakfast, Joe’s lips uncomfortably close to Ember’s ear as he whispered some observation to her, winning a laugh, winning a softness in her face that Freddy had never seen before.
They were good for one another. He would never have said perfect, because the match, to him, had seemed so wildly uneven from the get. But perhaps perfection was its own sort of trap. What they had instead was balance.
“Morning!” he sang, dropping onto the bench opposite of them, watching the way his presence cracked them apart, back to a respectable distance. “Sleep well?”
“Not as well as you,” Ember returned, raising her brows. “You’ve slept quite late. Usually you’re already a rasher of bacon deep by now.”
“Ah, well,” Freddy said with a shrug, noting the way Joe’s eyes flicked to his muddy boots. Noting the slight frown. “You can’t hold a bit of rest against me.”
“Lazy bones,” said Ember fondly.
When they had eaten and she had gone out to have the carriage brought around, Joe put his elbows on the table, leaning forward, staring in that unsettling, all-too-quiet way of his.
Freddy sighed loudly, narrowing his own eyes at the other man. “What?”
“Hm?” said Joe, still staring.
“I went for a walk,” Freddy snapped. “Is that a crime?”
“No.”
He frowned. “I couldn’t sleep. You can’t blame me for that.”
“I wasn’t blaming you for it,” Joe returned, giving a single, steady blink of his eyes. “I would be shaken too, in your place.”
“Please,” Freddy quipped, rolling his eyes. “You’re never shaken.”
It made Joe smile, which was perhaps even more unsettling than the staring. “Of course I am.”
Freddy doubted that very much. If it was true, he had certainly never seen it. He frowned, looking down at his hands, at the dull glint of his wedding band over the raw skin beneath it, worn thin by the constant twisting of the ring it had endured over these last days.
“She doesn’t want me there,” he said finally, softly. “Does she?”
“She lifted the ban,” Joe replied evenly. “It might not be a perfumed invitation back to your marriage, Freddy, but it’s a start.”
“But what if it was only because of my mother’s wedding?” he argued, wrinkling his brow. “What if that’s the only reason?”
“It isn’t,” Joe told him. “I wrote up that ban myself. I sat with her for its creation. She wasterrifiedof having to face you in person, Freddy. Determined to avoid it at all costs. Something must have changed for her to allow it to be struck down. Much has probably changed. It has been a long time.”
At that point, they were interrupted by Ember’s return and call to them from the inn door. Joe clapped him on the shoulder in passing, a quick, firm reassurance that he was not alone. Not entirely alone, anyway.
Ithadbeen a long time. That much was true. But, for all his folly and foibles, Freddy remembered his wife with enough clarity to know that time itself was not enough to shake her of any deeply held beliefs. It had to have been something else.
Perhaps she has found someone else, a voice suggested, sharp and evil in his ear.Perhaps you are just a memory now. Just a memory, now and forever.
