When the plates were cleared, Lavinia realized she had not once wished to escape, or even to hide. She had simply been there, among them, as herself.
As the party rose from the table, Lady Montfort dabbed at her eyes with a linen napkin. “Well,” she declared, “that was the most entertaining dinner I have endured in twenty years.”
Tristan stood, hands braced on the table. “I hope you will join us again. I believe Sophia and Whisper are planning a coronation for tomorrow.”
Sophia nodded furiously. “There will be a crown.”
Frances whispered, “And a blue ribbon.”
They retreated to the drawing room, and very soon, Lady Montfort’s gentle snoring could be heard. She would deny it later, but every wall in Evermere could testify, and Lavinia found herself wandering the hallway outside the terrace, her pulse oddly uneven.
She was not sure if she wanted the evening to end or for it to go on forever.
“Lady Lavinia.”
She turned. Tristan was there, his hair disheveled as if he had spent the last hour in debate with his own conscience.
He did not come closer at once. “Will you walk with me?” he asked.
“Yes.” She nodded.
He opened the garden door, and they stepped out together. They walked in silence for a stretch, the only sound the crunch of stone and the sigh of distant leaves. Every step Lavinia took felt both heavy and weightless.
At last, they came to a small stone bench beneath the rise of a trellised rose. In summer, it would be a riot; tonight, it was all shadow and suggestion. He gestured for her to sit, and she did, careful to keep her breathing even.
He sat beside her, but not too near. “I had planned to say something clever,” he began. “But it escapes me now.
“Perhaps it was not worth saying,” Lavinia replied, surprising herself with how gentle she sounded.
He almost smiled, but did not. “Perhaps.”
They sat, wordless, for a minute or a year. She heard the sound of her own breath, and his, and the low, unhurried ticking of the world rearranging itself.
He reached into his coat, and her heart stopped.
“I have something for you,” he said, and in his palm was a small, battered pouch. He pulled the drawstring, and there, shining in the moonlight, was her mother’s amethyst pendant.
Lavinia’s hands flew to her mouth. “Where?—”
“I found it at the masquerade,” Tristan said. “You left it behind. I did not know it was yours, not until much later. But I could not let it go.”
She stared at the stone, all the memories it contained, the nights she had clutched it for courage, the mornings she had worn it for hope.
He held it out. “I have kept it every day since. I told myself it was a mystery to solve, but the truth is, I did not want to let go of the possibility that someone had once looked at me and seen more than just Evermere.”
Her voice, when it came, was rough with emotion. “You were the man at the ball.”
He nodded. “And you were the woman who vanished at midnight, leaving me to wonder if I had dreamed the whole of it.”
Lavinia’s hands shook as she took the pendant. The chain tangled, as it always did. She tried to steady herself, but her eyes stung and her vision blurred.
Tristan helped her untangle it, his fingers grazing hers, and in the contact, there was more than warmth, for there was something like peace.
He did not let go. “I wanted the woman from the ball, but now I want something else even more.”
She tried to laugh. “Is this where you say you want my hand in marriage?”
He looked away, the smallest flush on his cheek. “No,” he said. “It is where I tell you that I wantyou. The true you. The one who has survived heartbreak and poverty and every indignity life could invent. The one who taught my daughter how to be confident and show her foolish father how wrong he had been. The one who makes me wish I had lived differently, just so I could be worthy of you.”
