Temperance looked at her. “You know what you should say.”
“I do,” Albina agreed. “But I would like to hear your opinion regardless.”
“Say yes,” Temperance said simply.
“To the courtship.”
“To all of it,” Temperance said. “Whatever he asks, within reason. Say yes.”
Albina looked at her daughter for a long moment with the warm, private expression that she had been wearing since the moment Temperance walked through her door three years ago and changed everything.
“You know,” she said, “for someone who has been very firm about not taking her own advice, you dispense it rather well.”
Temperance looked at her teacup. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do,” Albina said pleasantly.
Temperance said nothing. She reached for the plate of biscuits on the table between them and took one and looked at the garden, and Albina let her look, because that was one of the useful things about knowing someone well, the understanding of when to press and when to simply sit beside them and let them find their own way to the thing.
“He is a good man,” Temperance said, after a while. Not about Elias this time. The inflection was different.
“He is,” Albina agreed, in the same careful tone of a woman picking her way across uncertain ground.
“He is infuriating,” Temperance said.
“Also true,” Albina said.
“He makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.”
“Yes.”
“And he has absolutely no idea how to say what he means without saying seventeen other things first.”
“No,” Albina agreed. “He does not.”
Temperance ate her biscuit and looked at the garden and said nothing further. Albina watched her daughter sit with whatever she was sitting with and felt the warmth of the morning and the particular gratitude of a woman who had been given back something she had lost, and who understood, better than most, what it meant to be given a second chance at the good things.
“Temperance,” she said.
“Mmm.”
“Do not wait too long.”
Temperance looked at her. Her expression was the composed one, the managed one, the one she had developed over twenty-two years of being in a place that required it. But underneathit, just at the edges, was something else, something warmer and less certain and considerably more honest.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said again.
“I know you don’t,” Albina said. “Think about it.”
CHAPTER 27
Albina had taken the news of the dinner with a hint of ‘I told you so’.
“Of course,” she said when Harper told her at breakfast, smiling knowingly. “Joseph and I will manage perfectly well.”
“I would not be long,” Harper said.
“Take as long as you need,” Albina said, and went back to her toast, and the conversation was over.
