She looked at him, her laughter fading slightly. “What do you mean?”
“The games. The laughter. The way ye made up that story for the little one without thinking about it.” He was watching the children still. “This is who ye were before Gordon.”
She felt her throat tighten.
The garden was bright around her. The children were running and laughing. John was wearing a daisy crown. Caroline was wiping tears of laughter from her cheeks.
The sun was warm, and the grass was green, and Valeria was standing in a garden she was allowed to be in, playing games shewas allowed to play, laughing without looking over her shoulder to check if anyone would punish her for it.
“I had forgotten,” she murmured, “what it feels like to play.”
“Then keep playing,” he said.
She smiled at him. A genuine smile. Not the careful one she wore in company, but the one that reached her eyes and transformed her face and made her look like the girl who stole apples and put frogs in boots and laughed so loud that the horses started.
Edward saw it. She watched him see it. And the look in his eyes when he saw it was worth every game she had played that afternoon.
They stood there for a moment. Sunlight poured across the lawn. Caroline was shouting something about the relay times being inaccurate because Horace had stopped to examine another caterpillar.
He looked at her. She looked back at him. The sun was warm on the lawn, and the children were laughing.
“He needed to win,” Edward said quietly. “Boys like him, boys who have nothing, need to know that they can beat something, even if it is not real. Even if the man slowed down. Because the feeling of winning, even once, even at a rigged race, stays with them. It is kindling ye can build a fire from later.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You speak from experience.”
“Nathaniel let me win our first game of chess. I was fourteen, and I had never played before. I won in twelve moves, and I did not realize until years later that he had moved his queen into a trap on purpose. But by then, it did not matter. I had spent fourteen years losing everything. Winning one game of chess was enough to make me believe that winning was possible.”
Tears pricked her eyes, but she blinked them away. “You are a good man, Edward.”
“I am not. But I am trying.”
“That is the same thing.”
The children left at four. The matron had gathered them like a shepherd gathering lambs that had been let loose in a very nice field and were reluctant to leave.
Horace cried. He had found a third caterpillar, this one named Margaret, and he did not want to leave her. The matron scooped him up, and he wailed into her shoulder until Thomas gave him a biscuit from his pocket, slightly crushed and covered in lint. He ate it and then fell asleep before they reached the gate, with Margaret cradled gently in his other hand.
William shook Edward’s hand. His handshake was fierce, the handshake of a boy who had won a race against the Hound and intended to tell everyone about it for the rest of his life.
“I will beat you again,” he vowed.
“I look forward to it,” Edward said.
Thomas hugged Valeria. He just walked up, wrapped his arms around her waist, pressed his face into her dress, and did not say anything. She put her hand on his head. His hair was warm from the sun, and his shoulders were thin.
She thought about the boy Edward had been, sleeping under a bridge in Edinburgh, and she held Thomas for a moment longer than necessary.
Ruth did not cry. She shook Valeria’s hand like an adult. Her handshake was firm, her jaw was set, and her dark eyes were steady.
“I will come back,” she said.
“I know you will.” Valeria smiled.
“I borrowed three books from your library. I will return them next Tuesday.”
“Keep them for as long as you need.”
Ruth considered that. “I will return them next Tuesday,” she repeated, because she was not the kind of girl who kept things longer than she had promised. Valeria loved her for it.
