“So you wrote to me,” she said.It was more of a statement than a question.
But he still felt like he had to answer it.“I did,” he said softly.
“More than a couple of times,” she said, her gaze straying to the bag sitting on the floor near her.
“I wrote for a long time,” he said, “and so did you.”
“I understand why he did it,” Thea said.
Nathaniel’s eyes widened.“How?”he asked.“Because I don’t.”
“He was trying to help you,” she said gently.“If someone I loved was in a similar situation and I didn’t have our experience, I might have thought to do the same thing.”
“You would have kept someone from someone they loved?”he said, staring at Thea.
“If I thought it was better for them, perhaps,” she said.“I’m not saying it was the right thing to do, but I can understand why he might have thought it was a good idea.And I believe him when he says he’s sorry now.”
“You’re more generous than I am,” he said, the words bitter.“I...I do not think I could be so forgiving.”
“We cannot change the past,” Thea said quietly.“But this changes everything I have thought for the past ten years, and I would be willing to forget the past and move forward.”
Her words gave Nathaniel hope—more hope than he’d felt in years.
“What did you just say?”he asked, the words barely above a whisper.He wanted to hear it again.
“I want to read your letters,” she said.“Let’s separate them, and I’ll read yours and you read mine, and we can talk about it tomorrow.”
Tomorrow?He didn’t want to wait till tomorrow.
He’d just found out that the woman he loved had been forcibly separated from him by his brother…and now she wanted to wait until tomorrow?
The words hurt to say, but he said, “If that’s what you want.”
He’d waited ten years.One more day couldn’t hurt that much…except it did.
Thea reached for the bag and began sorting the letters inside into two stacks—one that he recognized and one he didn’t.She slipped the envelopes with her handwriting on them back into the bag and handed it to him.
“Thank you for your help,” she said.“It meant more than you know, and I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to work today had you not allowed me to rest yesterday.Thank you for that.”
“You know I would do anything for you,” Nathaniel said, the words slipping out unbidden, and she looked up at him with a tentative smile that went straight to his head.
She’d smiled at him.
“Thank you,” she said.“I will close up soon.”
Nathaniel took the words as the dismissal they were meant to be and left the café, the bag over his shoulder.He wanted to read her letters, too.And if there was a chance he was going to turn back into a cat at some point, he wanted to get home and read them before the change happened.
Hopefully he wouldn’t be a cat as long as the last time, if it did happen again.
Nathaniel made his way to the orphanage, lost in his thoughts.For the past couple of years, he had been transitioning between the orphanage and his parents’ home, and he didn’t want to be alone if, by some chance, he turned into a cat in the middle of the night and woke up trapped in a form that could not open doors.
He would rather be in the orphanage, where the children were inevitably going to come jump on his bed and wake him up—therefore opening the door—than be at his parents’ home alone.
Roan used to sleep there but lately had taken to spending his nights at the tavern, preferring to bunk down in his office rather than spend time with Nathaniel.
Maybe that would change with Abigail’s arrival.
Maybe Roan would be bringing her to their childhood home.
