"I've been preparing for seven years. I should hope I'm ready by now."
The words landed like a stone in still water. Harriet felt ripples of meaning spreading outward, implications she wasn't quite ready to face.
"Sebastian," she said slowly. "When you say you've been preparing for seven years..."
"I mean exactly what you think I mean." His voice was quiet, resigned. "I've wanted this…wanted you…for longer than I care to admit. The circumstances are not what I would have chosen, but the outcome..." He shook his head. "I'm not unhappy, Harriet. Whatever you might think, I'm not unhappy."
"But you're not happy either."
"I'm... hopeful." He turned to look at her, and in the moonlight, his grey eyes were silver. "That's more than I ever expected to feel. I'll take it."
Harriet felt something shift in her chest, a loosening, a softening, something that might have been the first stirrings of an emotion she wasn't ready to name.
"I don't know what I feel," she admitted. "I've spent so long hating you, and then not hating you, and now... I don't know. I don't know what this is."
"You don't have to know. Not yet." Sebastian's voice was gentle. "We have time, Harriet. A lifetime, in fact. There's no rush."
"What if I never figure it out? What if I spend our entire matrimony in this... this state of uncertainty?"
"Then I'll spend our entire matrimony trying to make you happy anyway." Sebastian shrugged. "It's not a complicated plan."
"It should be more complicated. This whole thing should be more complicated." Harriet laughed, a slightly hysterical sound. "I'm entering into matrimony with a man I spent seven yearsdespising. That should feel like a tragedy. So why does it feel like..."
"Like what?"
She couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't put into words the strange, fluttering hope that had taken root in her chest. The sense that maybe, just maybe, this wouldn't be the disaster she had feared.
Instead, she said: "Like the beginning of something."
Sebastian was quiet for a long moment. Then, slowly, he reached out and took her hand.
It was the first time he had really touched her since the betrothal. His fingers were warm, his grip gentle but firm. Harriet felt her breath catch.
"It is the beginning," he said quietly. "Whatever else it becomes, it's definitely that."
They sat in silence for a while, hands intertwined, watching the stars wheel overhead. The night was cold, but Harriet didn't feel it. She was warm from the inside out, warmed by something she refused to put a name to.
Tomorrow, she would wed Sebastian Vane. Tomorrow, her life would change irrevocably.
But tonight, in this quiet garden with his hand in hers, she allowed herself to feel something she hadn't felt in a very long time.
Hope.
***
The wedding was a truly beautiful affair.
That was the word everyone used, afterward…beautiful, lovely, perfect. The sun shone, the flowers bloomed, and the bride looked radiant in white silk and her grandmother's pearls. It was exactly the sort of wedding that society expected and approved of.
Harriet barely remembered any of it.
She remembered walking down the aisle, her arm tucked through her mother’s, Lady Fordshire had insisted on giving her away, tradition be damned. She remembered seeing Sebastian at the altar, his expression carefully composed but his eyes burning with an intensity that made her stumble slightly on her hem.
She remembered the vicar's words, washing over her like water, and the responses she gave automatically, barely hearing herself speak. She remembered the ring sliding onto her finger, a family heirloom, Sebastian had told her, worn by every Vane bride for four generations.
And she remembered the moment when the vicar pronounced them man and wife, and Sebastian turned to her with a question in his eyes.
They were supposed to kiss. Tradition demanded it. The congregation expected it.
