He made a face, a grimace. “I know I made you miserable,” he said, “but I neverwantedto.”
She frowned, still gripping that little corner of pie. “I know that.”
He exhaled heavily, turning and making his way to the stone slab, where he’d left the wet rag. He started to dab up the smear of flour, his heart grating against his ribs in sickening slaps.
“Freddy, I know that,” she said a little louder. “I never thought you were harming me for the joy of it. I don’t think you did that to any of us.”
“I didn’t,” he muttered, focused on the way the cloth cleared the flour, at the way it removed the gritty proof of the mess he’d made. He folded it and passed it over again, his breath oddly thin in his lungs, like it was vanishing of its own accord.
“Freddy.” She was behind him, her dainty little hand suddenly sitting on his shoulder, its warmth soaking through the linen of his shirt.
“You were going to show him those stories one day,” he said quietly, still gripping the rag, still focused on it. “You were going to, weren’t you? When he was old enough.”
She didn’t answer right away, her fingers tightening ever so slightly on his shoulder. “I don’t know,” she said a moment later, very softly. “I might have, one day, if you never came back. If he asked.”
He shuddered, his face feeling very hot.
“I never told him anything about you that was not heroic,” she continued. “He thought you were away on an adventure, like a knight. He worships you, Freddy, you must see that.”
“Like a knight,” he repeated, sniffling. “Tilting at windmills.”
“Freddy!” she said, tugging at him now, pulling him to turn around, revealing to herself the tears that had started to escape down his cheeks. “Oh, God, Freddy. Oh, my love.”
He tried to laugh, to shake it off, reaching up with his dirty hand to try to push the tears away, but she did not let him.
She pulled him firmly down into her arms, her hand sliding around the back of his neck and resting in his hair. She let him drop his head onto her shoulder, let him collapse a little into her strength.
Absurdly, it made him want to break apart a little harder. He felt it tugging at him, inviting him to tear down the dam on his shame and pain. Instead, he wrapped his arms around her. Instead, he held her back, burying his face in her tangled hair and breathing deeply.
He felt her this time not in heat, but in presence. In security. He gripped her fiercely and shattered a little bit in the process.
She didn’t seem to mind it at all.
When he pulled back, likely pink and puffy, she didn’t look away from his face. In fact, there was a softness in her eyes that he hadn’t seen there before. Not since he’d come back, certainly, but perhaps even before that, perhaps not even in the charmed perfection of their early marriage or its gradual decay on the Continent.
“Freddy,” she said one more time, reaching up to touch his face, to stroke the tips of her fingers over his brow, her thumb clearing the tear that hovered at the corner of his eye, “I am so sorry.”
He couldn’t move for a moment. He couldn’t quite grasp what she’d said. He could only stare.
“I am sorry,” she said again, bringing her other hand up and holding his face in it. “For my part in it all. For ever making you feel like this. For the gossip sheets. For keeping you from Oliver. For all of it. I am so very, very sorry.”
He reached up to take her wrist, to pull it forward so that he could lay a kiss in her palm, a benediction, a gratitude.
She smiled at him, looking a bit teary-eyed herself.
“We should go to sleep,” he said softly, glancing around the kitchen. “We ought to get a few hours, if we can.”
She nodded, taking a step back to allow him to lead, to extinguish the extra lights he’d set ablaze during his time in the kitchen.
When they reached the fork in the hallway where they must diverge, he turned to her to say his good nights, only to find her smiling at him, as though she were anticipating some foolishness he hadn’t even committed yet.
“It’s only a couple of hours,” she said. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
He blinked at her, a hint of something like joy tugging at the corners of his lips. “I shouldn’t?”
“Not tonight,” she confirmed, a little smirk and a roll of the eyes confirming that she saw it too, in his face. “Just tonight. If you want.”
“Yes,” he said, reaching out for her hand, breaking fully into a grin as she tugged him toward her room. “I want.”
