“So, Just Tom, you now have the luxury of a choice your forebears didn’t consider themselves to have. Theburdenof a choice. Keep the estate or let it go. Which you have exactly…” She looked at the clock suspended from the platform. “Three minutes to decide.”
“Oh, I have to decide now, do I?” A woman bustled past, her enormous rucksack knocking his shoulder. Tom put an arm out so the bag wouldn’t bump into Amelia. He actually did have to decide soon. Connor’s law firm had got him an extension on the settlement, but the deadline was fast approaching.
“Let’s say you do. Let’s say this is the moment. What would you want to do with the estate if saying it made it magically come true? Answering on behalf of yourself, and yourself alone, without all the weight of family legacy and human history on top. What picture comes to your mind?”
“Oh, Amelia.”
“Humor me. A picture came to your mind, didn’t it? What was it?”
“My artist’s impression,” he spat out, without thinking. “I want the hotel and the community garden and picnics on the lawn. I want another dog. Ireallywant another dog. I want…” He looked deep into her eyes. He knew them well enough that he could go away and draw and color them in intense detail: every marbled shade of brown, every fleck of gold, every dark eyelash, the way the light reflected in a splash of silver…
“You want…?”
“I want … everything.” Of course, what he had been about to say was “I want you.” “I’ll miss you, Amelia,” he said, instead.
She smiled sadly. “I’ll miss hearing you say my name. Also, you—I’ll miss you.”
A recorded announcement began, the calm baritone echoing along the platform, as if this was just any old day, any old traintrip, when it felt like a portal between worlds. Tom gathered his crutches and leaned on them, as Amelia scooped her handbag onto her shoulder.
“Remember when you told me about the diamond?” he said. “I got this jolt of relief—excitement, even—despite all the crazy shit going on, that maybe I could save the estate. I guess it’s that classic thing—until you’re forced to fight for something, you don’t realize what it means to you.”
“There you go, you see.” She pulled up the top handle of the suitcase and tipped it onto its wheels. “Easy as that.”
He stood aside, balancing on the crutches. Any other day, he’d offer to take the bag for her. “I’m not sure it’ll be that easy.”
“I’m certain it won’t. But you get a chance to create a home that you get to define—not just a home but a community. A thoroughly modern earldom. I think Miss Havisham would be quite restored by the thought. Though I do feel a little bad for Tandy Upcycles. I bet she has her stenciling all planned.”
“C’est la vie,” Tom said with a shrug. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” he added, so suddenly he surprised himself. But like with announcing he wanted to keep the abbey, it had to be said suddenly, because if he waited to rationalize it, to put it in perspective, see it in the wider picture, he wouldn’t say it at all. And he knew he would regret that, far more than a rejection.
She tilted her head. “Are you serious about that?”
He swung around on the crutches so he stood between her and the train doors. “You know what? I bloody am. We fought so hard to get this chance. What a waste to squander it now. Amelia,” he said, speaking louder and faster as the platform filled with people and noise, “you say that you get teased for looking too closely at the details. And you’ve quite rightly pointed out my flaw of looking too much at the big picture. So, between us, we have all distances covered.”
“Wait, your pitch to me here is that we’re a pair of progressive lenses?” She was almost shouting.
“Precisely. Together we see clearly. Apart, we’re just stumbling around bumping into things. We make a good team.”
She dragged her teeth across her lower lip. “I don’t want to go back,” she said, so quietly he had to read her lips, and he hoped like hell he was reading correctly. “I want to keep escaping. I want to keep escaping with you. Is that just me running away?”
“Like you said, you can’t outrun yourself. And, you know,” he added with a shrug, “if I am going to rebuild the abbey, I’ll need a textile conservator.”
Amelia grimaced, and he wondered if he’d pushed her from hypothetical territory to uncomfortably real territory. But hell, it was that or lose her forever.
“That might be tough,” she said. “There aren’t many of us around.”
“Well, if you hear of any… There would be visa issues to navigate, but I’m sure we’d figure something out—for the right person. Theperfectperson.” His belly knotted, even while his chest filled with an unfamiliar emotion he identified as hope. Pure, intoxicating hope.Half agony, half hope. “Amelia, perhaps this is not about escaping life, but finding it.”
Amelia stood her suitcase back up, still clutching the handle. “It would be rude not to say yes, seeing as Jane Austen herself brought us together. Though it hasn’t all been the rom-com I would have liked.”
“You can rewrite it as a rom-com, if you like. It’s your story. Our story.”
“Or I could be grateful forallthe pieces of the story that wove together to bring us to this moment. Yes, crappy stuff happened, to both of us, but it got us here today, to the start of something better. If we went back in time and erased even one of those crappy things, we might not have got to this very nice bit rightnow. Remember when you asked me: ‘What would you do if you didn’t have to be you?’ Ask me again.”
“What?”
“Ask me!” she yelled, as an announcement sounded. “We don’t have much time.”
“What would you do if you didn’t have to be you?”
