Her eyes glistened. "Even without…"
"Even without. Always without. I don't care about anything except you."
She stepped into his arms, holding him tight, her face pressed against his shoulder. Sebastian held her back and felt, for the first time in years that they might actually be all right.
Not perfect. Not complete in the way society defined completeness. But all right.
Together.
"Yes," Harriet said quietly, into his chest. "Let's do it. Let's stop trying. Let's just... live."
"Then that's what we'll do."
They stood there, wrapped in each other, as the sun disappeared behind the mountains and the first stars began to appear. And Sebastian thought that he had never been more content in his life.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Something was different.
She noticed it first on their second-to-last morning in the Lake District. She woke feeling strange…not ill, exactly, butoff. Her body felt heavy and unfamiliar, as though she had borrowed it from someone else and hadn't yet learned how it worked.
She dismissed it as tiredness. They had walked far the day before, perhaps too far. Her body was simply protesting the exertion.
But the next morning, it happened again. And this time, there was something else: a wave of nausea that rolled through her without warning, sending her stumbling from the bed to the washstand.
Sebastian was beside her immediately, his hand on her back. "Harriet? What's wrong?"
"Nothing." She straightened, wiping her mouth, trying to breathe through the lingering queasiness. "Something I ate, perhaps. The fish at dinner didn't taste right."
"Should I send for a physician?"
"No, no. It's passing already. I'm fine."
She was not fine. The nausea lingered at the edges of her consciousness all day, surging whenever she smelled something strong or ate something rich. She forced herself to eat, forced herself to smile, and forced herself to pretend that nothing was wrong.
Because it probablywasnothing. She had felt ill before. She had been late before. It had never meant anything.
But the morning they were meant to leave, it happened again…the nausea, the rushing to the basin, the horrible retching that left her pale and shaking. And as she sat on the edge ofthe bed, waiting for the world to stop spinning, she did the mathematics.
Her courses were late. Not dramatically, only a week, perhaps a bit more…but noticeably. She had been so focused on not thinking about such things that she had almost missed it.
Late courses. Morning nausea. A strange fatigue that had settled into her bones.
She knew what these signs could mean. She had looked for them desperately, month after month, for two years. And month after month, they had meant nothing.
They probably meant nothing now.
But a small voice in her head…a voice she had spent months trying to silence, whispered something else entirely.
***
Something was wrong with Harriet.
He noticed it on the journey home, the way she picked at her food, the way she turned pale at certain smells, the way she seemed distracted and distant even when she smiled. She insisted she was fine, that it was merely travel fatigue, that she would be perfectly recovered once they were home.
Sebastian didn't believe her.
"You would tell me," he said, as the carriage rolled through the familiar countryside near Thornwood, "if something was wrong?"
