“I’m delighted to hear it. Tell me, Miss Verity, are you glad to have your sisterback?”
The girl inhaled. She exhaled. She clasped her hands together. “More than you can guess, Mr. Ives.”
He knew theatre, and this young woman was made for it. “You should hate to lose her again.”
“I won’t lose her again.”
So confident that her sister would make the right choice.
Had the ground become molasses? Or his boots bricks? He could barely pick up his feet.
In front of them, Tessa and her mother slowed their pace as they reached the roses. And Verity and Remmy came closer, close enough to hear their conversation.
“I am so proud of you,” Mrs. King was saying. “You have grown up. You finally see what is important in the world.”
Tessa’s neck was bent, her shoulders caved in. “Yes, Mother. I do.”
“You shall have a lovely wedding. Sensible but pretty. Like you.” Mrs. King scowled at the flower in Tessa’s hair, the one Remmy had used to crown her Titania. “Such adornments are too elaborate.” She plucked the bloom from the braid where Tessa had coiled it and dropped it to the ground.
Verity picked it up and handed it to Remmy. “Will you put it in my hair, just as it was in Tessa’s?”
He took it and tucked it behind this little one’s ear. “There. Beautiful as your sister.”
Her sun-bright grin reminded him of another. But Tessa’s grin had been extinguished.
Mrs. King laid a hand on Tessa’s shoulder. “Now that you are home, we will do everything together. Until you wed, of course. I have all your old belongings in the attic. We’ll pull them out. And surely Verity’s behavior will improve with such an example as you to guide her. And the example of your esteemed future husband.”
Tilbury seemed to have heard that. He glanced backward, cheeks rushed red.
“Apologies,” Tessa mouthed toward him. To her mother, she said, “You should not assume?—”
“But Tessa”—her mother grasped her hands—“it will make me so happy.” She wrapped her eldest daughter in a hug. “So very happy if you marry him.”
Tessa froze, her arms stiff at her sides.
Remmy’s heart stopped. Waiting seemed to take forever. And in forever hung a guillotine.
Tessa cut the rope and hugged her mother back.
She’d made a choice, and Remmy had lost.
As Tessa hid her face in her mother’s neck, Remmy patted Verity’s shoulder. “Take good care of your sister. Love her hard for me, yes? Love her well.”
“Where are you going?”
And hewasgoing, around the still-hugging forms of Tessa and Mrs. King, around the vicar and the rector, toward the woods where he could be with the ghosts a little while.
“Stop him, Tessa!” Verity urged.
Remmy stopped, half waiting for the sound of footsteps that never came.
She wouldn’t stop him. And that made him bloody angry.
He swung back around, found Tessa watching him, a step away from her mother, a step closer to him. To the vicar, too.
“I’m good enough a man to walk away,” he said, holding Tessa’s gaze, “Because I don’t wantmyhappiness. I wantyours. And if this”—he waved at her mother, her father, Tilbury—“makes you happy, I’ll cut my own heart out to give you what you want.”
He spun around and got two steps into his misery before he changed his mind.
