A second later, she shook her head firmly.
Don’t.
She looked back at the baby’s hand around her finger and felt the distance between what she had agreed to and what she was standing in the middle of, and understood with quiet certainty that the two were no longer the same thing.
Whether he knew that, too, was a question she could not yet answer.
CHAPTER 20
Cecily stood at the window of the nursery.
She had been standing there for twenty minutes, listening to the baby breathe and thinking about tomorrow and not thinking about tomorrow, and looking at the garden as though it had something useful to say.
The baby was finally asleep. The deep, unhurried sleep she had not managed for the first three days of her illness—her small chest rising and falling in an easy rhythm. Cecily had stood at the crib for a long time watching it, the way one watched something they were relieved to see and not yet ready to walk away from.
Tomorrow, Mrs. Peel would come. The carriage would be brought around. The baby would go back to Granger Street, to the nursery with the window that had been repaired and the new blankets and the second nursemaid who had started last week, all of it better than it had been, all of it still not this.
She heard the door open. William came in quietly. He saw her at the window and stopped.
She turned.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. The fire was low, the room warm, and he was still in his evening clothes, which meant he had been in the study late again.
He looked at the crib, then at her.
“Asleep?” he asked.
“An hour ago. Properly, this time.”
“You’ve been standing there for a while.”
“I didn’t want to move, in case she heard it.”
He said nothing to that, which she took as understanding.
He came to the crib and stood over it in the way he did, looking down at the baby’s small sleeping face. He stood there for a while. Cecily turned back to the window and let him have it.
“The east window in the main corridor,” he began. “Did Prentiss speak to you about it?”
“He mentioned it yesterday. The frame has warped.”
“I’ve had someone look at it. They can fix it on Thursday, but it means the corridor will be cold for two days.” He glanced at her. “I thought you should know, given your feelings about cold corridors.”
“I don’t have particular feelings about cold corridors.” She hid her smile.
“You told Mrs. Eldridge last week that the one outside the library was cold enough to store meat.”
“That was an observation, not a feeling.”
“Mrs. Eldridge found it memorable enough to repeat.” He moved to the chair by the fire and sat, stretching his limbs.
Cecily turned away from the window. “I may have been emphatic.”
“You were accurate,” he chuckled. “It is cold enough to store meat.” He looked back at the fire. “Thursday.”
“Thank you.”
She moved to the other chair, not the one she had been occupying for the past two weeks—she had made a vague decision not to take the same chair every time, as though this would prevent the evening sessions from becoming a habit, which she recognized as the sort of logic that would not survive interrogation and had therefore not interrogated it.
