He looked at the water. “I have a sister.”
She arched against him. “That is certainly not a harmless fact.”
His eyes narrowed on the waves. “I have not written to her in four months. She writes to me. I do not answer, or I answer badly. She is…” He searched for a word that would be true without being revealing. “She is very young, and she has been through a great deal, and the distance I have placed between us was meant to protect her, and I suspect it has done the opposite.”
“Distance usually does.”
“You would know.”
“I would.” She turned her face slightly against his chest, and her breath was warm through the wet fabric for the first time. “I left my youngest sisters to come here. I told myself it was for the trust. For Jane, who ought to have been the one to inherit it. For duty. But part of it…”
She stopped. Drew in a ragged breath and considered it before releasing it. “Part of it was that I could not sit in that house any longer and be the one who held it together. I was so tired of holding it together.”
He tightened his arms around her, and this time, it was not an accident. Nor was it from warmth, but from the recognition that she had said something true, and that the truth had cost her, and that the only response he had was the one his body was already providing.
“You should write to her,” she said. “Your sister. You should write to her, and you should not write badly this time. You should tell her something real, even if it is only that you miss a deaf spaniel, because that is more than silence, and silence is what frightens the people who love us.”
“Youare givingmeadvice? The woman who tried to drown herself on this very beach?”
Shetried to look up, but all she succeeded in doing was bumping his chin with her forehead. “Iamgiving you advice. From a position of considerable authority, as I am currently demonstrating the consequences of failing to communicate with the people one cares about.” She coughed. Smaller than before, but it reminded them both of what had happened. “Write to her. Please.”
He said nothing for a long time. The water continued to retreat. The sand widened below them. The gull—or another gull—called from the water, and the sound was carried away by the wind.
“I will write to her,” he said.
She nodded against his chest. “Good. That is two.”
This time, his body shook slightly. A shiver. Not a laugh—he did not laugh.
Her breathing had evened. The tremors had stopped. The warmth between them—fragile, hard-won, entirely dependent upon proximity—held in the narrow space the stone permitted, and neither of them moved to disturb it.
The tide retreated. The light changed. The hours passed, and the sand showed itself, and the cliff path emerged from the water dark and strewn with kelp but solid.
He did not move until the beach was fully passable. Then he loosened his arms, and she sat back, and the cold rushed into the space between them with a swiftness that made them both draw breath.
Her face was still pale, her lips still coloured with the cold, her hair stiff with salt. But her eyes were clear—clearer than he had seen them in many hours—and the directness in them was not the challenge she had brought to the gallery on the first night but something else. Something that did not require him to defend himself against it.
“Thank you,” she said. “For pulling me out.”
“Do not go into the water again.”
“I cannot promise that.”
“Miss Bennet.”
“Do not ask me to promise that.” She held his gaze. “If I see her—or think I see her—I will go. You know that. I would rather not lie to you about it.”
He looked at her and swallowed something sticky and hard in his throat. She was telling him the truth, and the truth was not what he wanted, but wanting something different would not alter what she was.
“Then I will be on the beach,” he said. “When you go.”
She took this in. Her mouth moved—the ghost again, the warmth—and she did not say what the expression said, and he did not ask.
He stood and offered her his hand, and she took it, and they climbed down from the shelf together.
Chapter Twenty
Thebeachwasanothercountry.
