Beatrice was quiet for a moment. “You can’t marry someone’s enthusiasm for their garden.”
“No. But you can tell rather a lot about a person by whether theyhaveany.”
“That is not a sound matrimonial strategy.”
“It’s mine, though.”
Beatrice sighed—not an impatient sigh, more the sigh of someone who understood the argument completely and found it both admirable and maddening in equal measure. The baby made a small sound. She patted his back again, the rhythm unbroken.
“Cecily,” she said carefully. “You’re twenty-three.”
“I’m aware.”
“Mama is–”
“Also aware, and not shy about reminding me.”
“She worries.”
“She thinks too badly of the situation.” Cecily softened it with a slight smile. “I know she means well. I know you both do. But I cannot… I’ve sat across from a great many very suitable gentlemen in a great many very well-appointed drawing rooms, and I have tried, genuinely tried, to imagine spending the next forty years breakfasting with them, and Bea, I cannot do it. I cannot do it if there isn’t somethingrealthere.”
“Real,” Beatrice repeated.
Cecily didn’t know if she was mocking the word or simply testing it. “You know what I mean. You have it. With Edward.”
Something moved across Beatrice’s face at that—quick and warm and a little undone, the expression she wore when Edward was mentioned in certain ways.
She looked down at the baby. “Edward was not an easy beginning.”
“No. But it was real. From the very start, even when it was difficult, it was real.” Cecily met her sister’s eyes. “That’s what I want. Not easy. Not perfectly arranged. Just… real.”
Beatrice didn’t answer immediately. The lamplight shifted. Outside, the sky was beginning to change color in the way it did just before dawn, that particular dark blue that wasn’t quite night anymore.
“And if it doesn’t come?” she asked. Not cruelly, but with genuine care, which was almost harder to hear.
Cecily had thought about this. Alone in the dark, in the particular honest hours between midnight and morning when she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t. She had thought about it carefully and had come to a conclusion she mostly believed.
“Then I’ll manage. I have things I care about. Books. People. I’m not—it isn’t as though my life would be empty.” A pause. “Itwould be quieter than I’d like, but I won’t fill the quiet with the wrong person just to fill it.”
Beatrice looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, “That is either very brave or very stubborn, and I genuinely cannot tell which.”
“Both, probably.”
“Yes.” A small smile. “Probably.”
“Cecily.” Beatrice’s voice had shifted, that particular half-step from sister into something older, more careful. “I only mean that love is not always—it doesn’t always arrive the way it does in your novels, fully formed and certain. Sometimes it grows. Sometimes you choose a person first, and the feeling follows.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve refused six men in three years, and your standard forsomething underneath itseems to be rising with each one.”
“My standards,” Cecily said with great dignity, “are entirely reasonable.”
“Your standards,” Beatrice retorted with equal dignity, “would challenge a saint.”
“Edward was hardly a saint when you met him.”
“Edward was a disaster when I met him. But that is not the point.” Beatrice shifted the baby again, who stirred and then resettled with a sigh of profound indifference to the conversation happening above his head. “The point is that I didn’t walk away because it wasn’t perfectly arranged. I stayed. And it became something real because I stayed long enough to let it.”
