“I am always teasing you,” he confirmed. “But they are. It is true. The sheep here really are enduring.”
“Fine,” she said with a smile. “You, Tommy, and the sheep. Here forever. Just like this road. Fosse Way, you say? Does that mean something terribly romantic too?”
He paused, blinking twice, and then said with a little shrug, “It means ditch.”
It made her laugh. “I suppose in the right light, a ditch might be romantic.”
His teeth flashed in the dark. “It is tonight. In any event, there was a point I wanted to make.”
“About ditches and sheep?” she asked, teasing.
“Perhaps,” he answered, rubbing his thumbs over her knuckles. “I wanted to show you that when something is built properly, Claire, when something is meant to exist, then it will always persevere, even if it gets a little overgrown. Things that are built with love always last. They always hold, even as war and culture and time moves on top of them. The deep things persevere.”
She felt the smile falter a little, felt her chest cave in a fraction. She wondered if the sky had stuttered a bit at the thing he’d just said.
She rose on her tiptoes and brushed her lips against his, featherlight and soft.
He returned it, just as carefully, just as gently. He looked like he wanted to ask her something, his head tilting, his fingers tensing a little. He pressed his lips together, clearly not wanting to risk it. Not yet, anyhow
“Are you ready to go back?” she asked quietly, as if to give him permission to let it wait, if it must.
“Back?”
She nodded, stifling a yawn. “It’s getting very late. The governess needs to be relieved. We should go back.”
“Not back,” he answered, just as softly as she’d kissed him. “Forward.”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He moved to follow the trail of old stones. He walked with purpose. And he held her hand all the way back to the cottage.
They bathed separately.The bathtubs, of course, were still in their separate rooms.
It gave Claire time to think, to try to turn over everything that had happened today. To consider it all and try to make sense of it.
She wondered if she ought to have kept a journal like her sister did. She wondered if maybe it was easier to understand the things that happened all at once when you could write them down, tear up the pieces, and try to put them into some sort of order.
Claire had never been able to write for just herself. She’d made a single journal entry once, when she was about eight years old, to try to be like her big sister, and then immediately had run it across the house and insisted Millie read it.
Millie had tried to explain that this wasn’t how journaling was meant to work, and Claire had decided in that moment that it was a stupid habit and a waste of good prose.
She laughed softly to herself, dragging an arm out of the deep, round tub and pushing a soapy cloth over it. Her hair was pinned on her head, but several long pieces had escaped down the column of her neck and into the water, each clinging to her skin in twisting patterns.
So she’d told him the truth. She’d confessed to loving him.
She supposed she had known this whole time that she still did. She had known it when she fled Bruges. She had known it when she’d sat in Dot’s study, pregnant with Oliver, and agreed to write those gossip sheets. She had known it when she watched him arrive on the drive that morning, squeezing the curtains in Oliver’s nursery.
Love had never been the problem.
Or the solution.
But perhaps this time could be different. Perhaps this Freddy was different.
No, there was no perhaps about it—Freddy was altogether new. He was changed. He could bake a pie and explain ancient history and stop their son from having a strop in the middle of a wedding. He could pause and be silent as easily as he could taunt and tease and laugh.
He was still himself. He was still the man who’d struck her like thunder, but now! Now, he was …
He was …
She dropped the rag into the water, gripping the thin lip of the tub and pushing herself to her feet, water sloshing down her bare body and taking the soot and soil of the day with it.
