He holds his breath. It’s astonishing how sunny this woman can be, despite all she’s lost.
“You might as well speak, whoever you are.” Her voice softens. “It’s all right.”
He slams the receiver down, heart pounding. He forgot about the cough on his last call. He’d let on there was someone on the line, and blown his cover. But then he lifts the receiver and rings her again. It might be the last time, if the auction is tomorrow and the rest of Merryn’s story is lost to time.
Thankfully, Helen is still there. Her voice is still soft when the operator connects them. “If you need to speak, I will listen. You won’t shock me.”
He will.
“Nor will anything you say offend me.”
It would.
“And there’s a reason that, of all the people you might have called, you’ve reached me. Many times. You see, I’ve lost my husband to the war, so I understand a fair bit about loss and death. Do you believe in coincidences?”
The line remains silent. She’s so understanding with strangers. So warm and approachable. It has been so long since she’s used this tone with him. What sort of man could wear out even Helen’s patience?
“Ho there!” a man’s voice sounds on her end. He’s in her house.Theirhouse.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she says to the man, voice muffled, then she uncovers the receiver and speaks to William again. “Whenever you’re ready to talk, I’m ready to hear.”
A click, and the line goes silent.
Cradling the receiver to his ear, he slides down the wall of the booth and lets her voice echo in his ear…but it’s drowned out by the memory of the man’s short, clipped voice. Does this mean he cannot think of her anymore? Cannot have this indulgence? The broken pieces of his soul fracture a bit more. He mustn’t jump to conclusions, though. The man might be a neighbor, a hired hand, perhaps even family. She hasn’t moved on.She hasn’t.
Sheshould.He hopes she does.
But he cannot bring himself to grasp that actually becoming a reality.
Marriage is not a gradient. He can hear the artist, Florence, flinging these words at him.You either are or you aren’t.
He is. He always will be.
But she isn’t.
He sets off running, feet pounding toward the soldiers’ hospital. It has been three days since his first visit and it would be hundreds more before he returned of his own free will. His delusions of helping someone have melted away, but Florence begged him. Pleaded. And his heart, as it turns out, isn’t completely dead after all, for he could not resist the pleas.
With Persephone tucked on his shoulder and Helen’s voice warming the deepest reaches of his heart, William passes through the front desk area with a quick check-in and makes his way to the garden again. The lieutenant isn’t there.
He asks, and the orderly directs him to a large, open dining room where someone is slumped in a wheeled chair in the window bay. He’s in a thick robe and slippers, without the poise he’d clung to before. William comes alongside him. “Good day, Lieutenant. How are you?”
Lieutenant Carmichael is hunched to the side, part sad, part angry. His gaze sharpens as he sees who it is. “Get out.”
“You remember me, I see.” William perches on the window bay, heart hammering. “Florence is a fine artist. I’ve seen her work.”
“Nurse!”
“You already know that, though,” William hastens on. “That’s how I met her—at the studio in Newlyn. She’s helping me track down a woman in a painting and I’m doing her a favor in exchange. An unofficial agreement of sorts.”
His eyes flash, but he doesn’t rise. Doesn’t beat William into a bloody pulp. His wrists, William notes, are shackled to the chair arms. But this time, Samuel’s eyes are lucid, his stare direct. Samuel is present, and William will push him. “Do you know how many hours she’s spent helping me track down some stranger? A great many, I’d imagine. And in exchange, she has asked me for merely one favor—that I speak with the man she’s hopelessly gone on—you.”
He’s breathing hard beneath his robe. His slippered feet shift. “You’re a spy.”
“Indeed. Sent from the outside to see if your heart still belongs to a lonely artist in Newlyn who wishes to marry the man who once asked her.”
He stares at the floor. His nostrils flare.
“Don’t tell me you’reun-asking her to marry you. Because she might hold you to your word.”
