Cecily stood in the doorway.
He sucked in a breath and couldn’t stop his pulse from thundering. He swallowed.
She was in a morning dress, her hair simply done, and she looked at him with the clear eyes that had been looking at him since a shore at dawn and had never once looked at him the way he probably deserved to be looked at right now, which was with significantly less composure than she was currently displaying.
She looked tired.
His heart sank. He had done that.
“William.” Her voice was very quiet.
“Cecily.” All he wanted to do was pull her into his arms and hold her. He straightened instead. “I… uh… I need to show you something. Will you come with me? Please?”
She looked wary, and he couldn’t blame her.
“Why?” She drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders.
“That is the best way I can think of to tell—no, show you what I think you should know.”
She studied him for a minute.
“Where?”
“The orphanage.”
He looked at her as she thought about it.
“All right, give me a few minutes,” she said.
She said very little in the carriage. They sat on opposite sides, with the morning moving past the window.
He was acutely aware of her, yet he looked at the street and thought about everything he intended to say and the order in which he intended to say it and arrived at no conclusion whatsoever.
“How are your sisters?” she asked, at some point past the Strand.
“Letitia is getting better at her Italian,” he replied, grateful that she spoke. “Isadora is reading the essays again. She has started annotating in the margins.”
The corner of Cecily’s mouth quirked up. “She told me she would.”
“She was right.” He looked at her. “They miss you.”
She looked at the window.
“I miss them too,” she said quietly.
He said nothing further. He had more to say, and he was going to say it, but not in a carriage.
What he had to say deserved to be said standing still, with nothing moving around him, in a place that meant something to both of them.
Granger Street looked different. That was the first thing that crossed his mind. It was in the quality of the building itself, which he had last seen in the November dark, with the smell of coal smoke and the institutional bleakness of a place doing its best with insufficient resources.
It was still a narrow three-story building wedged between a chandler and a solicitor’s office. But the windows on the upper floor were new, the glazing catching the light cleanly. The front steps had been swept. A cart was pulled up to the side entrance,and two men were carrying in what appeared to be a substantial delivery of firewood.
He heard Cecily exhale beside him.
He offered his arm. She hesitated before she took it, and they went in.
Mrs. Peel met them in the entrance hall with excitement. She looked at William.
