He let out a long breath. Outing himself was an irrevocable step. But if the magiocracy already knew he was helping the League, what benefit did he get by staying quiet?
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
And that was that. Mrs. Clark offered good wishes and a sympathetic look as they left. After Miss Dane gave his car the evil eye for any sign of invisible bugs and they ran their hands over the surfaces to feel for unseen objects, they were off to Baltimore.
They spent the trip talking about what they would and would not say, keeping their discussion as quiet and cryptic as possible in case they’d missed a recording device. He itched to cast a spell and find out for sure. For twenty years, he hadn’t gone a single day without using magic. How could he last two weeks?
Beatrix pulled into a parking space a block south of the newspaper building. Even at six thirty on a Sunday night, two floors of windows were lit up.
“Are we ready?” Lydia asked.
Miss Dane cleared her throat meaningfully. “What day did you get engaged?”
That effectively answered Lydia’s question. No, they werenotready. They needed to get their story straight.
Beatrix glanced at him. He gestured at her—go ahead, you make it up.
“The day before Peter’s coma started.” She bit her lip. “The day that Garrett …”
He had yet to get the entire story aboutthat, but the police had been at his bedside to update her several times during the period he was comatose while also able to hear what was said around him. He knew they had jumped to the wrong conclusion about Garrett, as he’d feared, but an entirely different one than he’d expected. He knew police thought Garrett had drugged them and left them for dead. He knew he was not expected to remember much if anything about it, so when Detective Tanner took his statement before lunch, his lies to that effect were accepted as truth.
Had Garrett’s body not disappeared, things would be very different.
“Should we mention what the police told us Garrett did?” Lydia murmured.
“No,” he and Beatrix said at the same time, and with the same level of conviction. The less said about that, the better.
“Anythingelsewe ought to go over?” Miss Dane asked. “Why Beatrix isn’t wearing an engagement ring, perhaps?”
“Because—because I wasn’t prepared when I asked her,” Peter improvised. “It just slipped out.”
“And you will be remedying that soon.” Miss Dane did not say this in the form of a question.
“I don’t want a ring,” Beatrix said, quiet but firm.
He turned to look at her, surprised.
“Beatrix,” Miss Dane said, “wemustrespect all the reasonable expectations of society?—”
“—in the interest of abolishing the unreasonable ones,” she said wearily, and he wondered how many times she’d heard that before.
“Why don’t you want one?” he asked.
She clasped her unadorned hands in her lap. “We don’t know how much your care will cost. If you buy jewelry for me, it will make me sick to see it.”
Not once since he’d recovered from his coma the day before had he thought about the coming hospital bill. His stomach twisted. How bad would it be?
Still, it hardly seemed fair that she should have to forgo visual proof of engagement.
“Wait a minute,” he said, realizing that he had another option at hand. He took the keys from the ignition, struggled out of the car and opened the trunk. Inside his suitcase, he found the small drawstring bag he was looking for and emptied its contents into his palm. He put back the brooch and tiny ruby earrings he’d seen every day of his life until he went off to the Academy, their presence enough to bring back memories of his nan. He closed his hand around her decades old, speck-of-a-diamond ring and hobbled back to the car.
As he sat next to Beatrix, the to-do list mindset—ring, check—evaporated. Thiswas their true engagement day. The very moment, in fact. He should say something more meaningful than “here, have this.”
“Beatrix,” he said, unaccountably flustered. Well—accountablyflustered, because he hadn’t prepared for what he thought could never be.
He got as far as “this is my grandmother’s ring” and trailed off, glancing down at it in his hands. On some level he still couldn’t believe this was happening. At the height of Beatrix’s despair over the Vows, she’d sworn she would never love him. In their first conversation as adults, right before he abducted her from her somewhat simpler life, she said she saw marriage as a loss of what little self-determination she had. It was amazing that now, here they were?—
He looked back at her, stricken. Now, here they were, and she couldn’t say no.
