A knock sounded.
“Come in.”
Sebastian entered—still in evening dress, his expression softened by the candlelight.
“I know I ought not be here,” he said. “It is shockingly improper to visit one’s bride on the night before the wedding.”
“I believe we have established that propriety and reality do not always align.”
“Just so.” He crossed to her, stopping at a respectful distance. “I wished only to see you—to be certain you are—” He faltered. “Are you well? Are you ready?”
“I am frightened,” she said honestly. “But I am also eager. To begin. To stop waiting and start living.”
“I feel precisely the same.” He reached into his pocket. “I have something for you. A wedding gift—though perhaps it is more than that.”
He withdrew a small box and opened it, revealing a ring—a thin gold band set with a single pearl.
“It is not much,” he said quietly. “Not beside the jewels that will one day be yours. But I wished to give you something from me; something that might mean—” He broke off, uncharacteristically uncertain.
“It is a pearl,” Cecilia whispered.
“Yes. I thought—after all that has passed with your mother’s necklace—that a pearl might speak of… restoration. Of things thought lost, found again.”
Tears slipped, unresisted, down her cheeks. “Sebastian—”
“You need not wear it if you do not like it,” he said quickly. “It is very simple… perhaps too sentimental.”
“I love it.” She lifted the ring from its box and slid it onto her finger. It settled there as though it had always belonged. “I love it—and I love you—and I can scarcely believe that, tomorrow, I am to become your wife.”
Emotion flickered across his face, and he pulled her into his arms, holding her close.
“I love you too,” he said against her hair. “I have loved you since you looked up from that book in the library and metmy eyes without flinching. I will love you tomorrow when you become my wife. I will love you next year and the year after and every year until we are old and grey.
She smiled, feeling the pearl ring warm on her finger, her mother’s necklace waiting on the dressing table, her future stretching before her bright and terrifying and full of hope.
***
Sleep did not come easily that night.
Cecilia lay wakeful, watching the firelight climb the ceiling while her thoughts moved restlessly through all that had passed, and all that lay ahead: the confrontation at Thornfield; the truth of her inheritance; Helena’s unexpected happiness; Sebastian’s gift.
The pearl ring gleamed softly in the dark.
Tomorrow she would be married. Tomorrow, she would become the Duchess of Ashworth. Tomorrow, she would step fully into a life she had never dared to imagine.
She thought of her mother—of what she might have said, had she been here.
She would have been happy. She would have told me to be brave, to reach for what I want, to refuse to accept less than I deserve.
Cecilia had been brave—afraid, uncertain, often doubting, yet brave nevertheless. She had walked into a ballroom in silver silk. She had faced down Lady Ashwood with proof of her wrongdoing. She had allowed herself to hope.
And tomorrow, that hope would be fulfilled.
She closed her eyes and pictured the chapel, the guests, the moment Sebastian would take her hand.
It still felt like a dream.
But it was a dream she was ready to live.
