“I can not.” The words came out broken, scattered across gasping breaths she could not control. Her voice trembled with a fear deeper than she could name. “This isn’t… I am not…”
Samuel’s hand remained extended, frozen in that reaching gesture, his eyes searching her face for something she could not give him.
“Alice—”
“You don’t understand.” She stepped back again, her foot catching on a root surfaced through fallen petals. The stumble made her feel small. A woman fleeing from something she had claimed not to want. “You speak of walls. Of cracks. Of slipping through defenses.” Her voice broke. “But my walls…”
She swallowed hard.
“My walls are all I have.”
The confession hung in the orchard air, raw and true.
She thought of the letter from her mother, the one she had torn to pieces, cream-colored fragments still scattered in her memory.Reasonable expectations. Excessive particularity. Traded like livestock at market.The words had cut because they reflected a truth she could not escape. In their world, love was not liberation.
Love was a cage that closed around you so gradually you did not notice the bars until they defined your entire horizon.
And Samuel—beautiful, controlled, devastating Samuel with his gray eyes and steady hands—was offering to be her cage.
He did not mean to be.
She knew this with a certainty that made the knowledge evenmore painful.
He would love her with the fierce protectiveness he had shown at breakfast and in quiet confrontations. He would defend her against whispers, shelter her from cruelty, wrap her in the warmth of his devotion.
Piece by piece, she would reshape herself to fit the space he made for her.
That was what love did.
That was what marriage required.
She had watched it happen to her mother, seen brilliant women reduced to shadows, and cataloged the devastation that came from giving yourself to someone who would accept the gift without understanding what they were destroying.
“I’m not,” she tried again, voice barely above a whisper. “I’m not brave enough for this.”
The words were both lie and truth.
She was brave. She had always been brave. Too brave, society would say. Too wild, too willing to do what she wanted regardless of consequence.
But this particular bravery—the courage to love someone and trust that love would not consume her—she did not possess.
Alice gathered her skirts.
It was automatic, her muscles answering the urgent need to flee before her mind could raise concerns about dignity or consequence. Silk brushedher legs as she turned, and the orchard lay before her like a path to freedom she had not realized she needed.
“Alice, please.”
His voice followed her down the path, calling her name as if it were something fragile that would break if she did not grasp it. She heard the desperation, the loss of something valuable. Everything she was choosing to leave behind was contained in those two small words.
She did not stop.
Her feet carried her between gnarled trunks, over the carpet of fallen petals, away from the man who stood in golden light with his hand still outstretched toward a space she no longer occupied. Apple blossoms continued to drift around her, unmoved by human heartbreak. By confessions of love, by the pain of wanting something too much to risk having it.
Behind her, the orchard remained silent.
Samuel’s plea lingered in the quiet grove like smoke from an extinguished candle, thinning as it rose into the late-afternoon shadows. Alice walked until she could no longer hear the echo of her name, until the house appeared through the trees, until the distance between them grew too great for any reaching hand to bridge.
The glove still pressed against her hip.
