The words settled between them, carrying weight far beyond roses and pathways.
“You were at war,” Eleanor said gently. “You could not have been here.”
“I know. But knowledge is rarely sufficient.” He looked back at the roses, his jaw tightening slightly. “Grief is not reasonable. It does not yield to argument. It simply… exists.”
Eleanor thought of her own grief—the mother who had faded, the hopes that had quietly collapsed, the armour she had built to shield herself from such vulnerability ever returning.
“Yes,” she agreed softly. “It simply exists.”
They stood together in silence, watching the roses that had endured despite neglect, and Eleanor felt something shift between them. Some final distance narrowing, some last defence quietly weakening.
***
They walked on.
The path wound through a series of smaller gardens—the herb garden, still largely untamed; the kitchen garden, now producing again beneath the cook’s careful supervision; the small orchard where apple trees were beginning to show their first buds. Eleanor asked questions, and Benjamin answered, his responses growing longer, more detailed, as they continued.
He carried memories of each place, she discovered. His mother teaching him to identify herbs by scent. His father attempting—and failing—to teach him to climb the apple trees. A childhood dog buried beneath a particular oak, marked by a stone long since obscured by moss and fallen leaves.
“I had forgotten,” he said, pausing beside the oak in question. “I had forgotten how much of my life took place in these gardens.”
“Perhaps that is why you could not bear to see them tended,” Eleanor suggested. “Too many memories concealed in every corner.”
He considered this. “Perhaps you are right.”
He looked at her, and something almost like wonder crossed his face. “I do not know. I only know that I can remember now, when I am here with you. The memories do not wound as they once did.”
Eleanor’s breath caught. She did not know how to answer such a statement—did not know what it meant, or what sheought to do with the warmth spreading quietly through her chest.
She was spared the necessity of reply by movement in the hedge beside them.
The cat.
It watched them from beneath a spill of untrimmed boxwood, its green eyes catching the light. It sat perfectly still, as it always did—wary, observant, prepared to flee at the slightest threat.
Eleanor felt her body stiffen. The familiar fear rose sharp and immediate, and for a moment she was back in the corridor, pressed against stone, unable to move or breathe.
But Benjamin stood beside her. And the cat was not blocking her escape—it was simply… present. Watching. Not advancing.
She forced herself to breathe. Forced her hands to unclench at her sides. Forced her feet to remain steady upon the path rather than carrying her away.
“It is all right,” Benjamin said quietly. He did not move toward her, offered no overt gesture of protection. He simply remained beside her, solid and composed. “It will not approach while we are here.”
“I know.” Her voice emerged steadier than she felt. “I know it will not.”
They stood together, observing the animal that observed them. Eleanor’s pulse still raced, but the panic began to recede—held at bay by sunlight, by Benjamin’s steady presence, by the simple fact that she was not alone.
“It appears healthier,” she said, surprising herself. “Than when I first saw it.”
“It has been fed regularly.” Benjamin’s tone remained measured, though she detected something beneath it—quiet satisfaction, perhaps. “It is still wary of my touch. But it ventures nearer than it once did.”
“Progress.”
“Of a sort.”
The cat’s tail flicked. Then, with studied indifference, it turned and vanished into the deeper shade of the hedge.
Eleanor released a breath she had not realised she held.
