A curiosity?
An experience?
Or something that lingered?
A flicker of something unfamiliar threaded through my chest.
I didn’t know if he did this often—if there were other women who had stood where I was standing now, felt what I was feeling, asked themselves the same questions and walked away changed.
Or if this?—
this slow shift between us?—
meant something more.
I didn’t ask.
Not yet.
Because for the first time, I wasn’t trying to define it before I understood it.
I just … let the question exist.
“You said something at dinner,” I said after a moment.
His eyes sharpened slightly. “I said a lot of things.”
“This one mattered.”
A beat of silence stretched between us.
“About Charleston,” I clarified.
That got his attention.
It didn’t show in any obvious way—his expression didn’t change, his posture didn’t shift—but I felt it in the subtle stillness that settled into him.
“You told Aunt Mabel you were going back,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And that you’d follow me.”
“Yes.”
My fingers stilled against his chest.
“That wasn’t part of the arrangement.”
“No.”
The answer came easily.
Too easily.
Something flickered in my chest.
“Then what is it?” I asked.
