Harper looked at his son.
“She goes to people when something is wrong. I have noticed this about her.”
Joseph stood up and brought the cat to the desk and held her out, and Harper took her, because the alternative was a conversation he was not prepared to have. Immediately, Soot settled against his chest.
“What is the point of all of this?” He put his hand on her back.
“You are giving her love,” Joseph shrugged. “And she is giving it back, that is rather the point, is it not?”
Harper sighed.
“Did Albina teach you how to talk like that?”
“She might have rubbed off on me,” he laughed and sat back down, looking at his father holding the cat. “I want you to be happy.”
Harper looked at his son, surprised by this sudden shift.
“I know that is not a very useful thing to say, and it doesn’t solve anything. But I wanted to say it.” He paused. “You have been sad for days and I don’t like it.”
“I am not sad,” Harper scoffed.
Joseph looked at his father as if he did not believe a single word that was coming out of his mouth, but did not argue further.
Instead, Harper thought about what the house had been before they came. Quiet and ordered and exactly as he had arranged it, everything in its correct place, everything running according to the standards he had set and the routines he had established. He had arrived at Wilmington expecting something similarand found instead a household that ran on entirely different principles, chaotic and warm, and his son, who had spent the last several months slowly becoming someone Harper had not anticipated.
“She makes you laugh, you know,” Joseph said, “You don’t laugh very much usually. But sometimes, with her, you do.”
“Joseph,” Harper said. “I want you in bed before the guests arrive, I mean it. Enough of talking.”
He went out and closed the door. Harper sat alone in the study with the cat and the unanswered papers, thinking about what his son had said.
She makes you laugh.
He thought about Joseph’s face when he laughed. The way it transformed him, the composure entirely gone, just a boy being delighted by something, just a child who had found someone who made the world feel lighter.
What it would mean to take that away? To go back to Sedgewick and the quiet rooms and the ordered routines and the life that worked and asked nothing unexpected of anyone.
I want you to be happy.
If he married Temperance, he thought. Just that, just the thought of it, arriving before he could stop it.
Joseph would not mind.
Not much later, Albina knocked once and came in.
“I hope I didn’t disturb you. I just wanted to come in and check up on you. How are you feeling about tonight?”
“Fine,” Harper said.
Albina looked at the desk. The papers in the same position they had been in that morning, the broken pen on the edge of it.
“The flowers look wonderful, I think. Mrs. Peel has done a remarkable job with the dining room.”
“I am sure she has,” Harper said.
“Temperance approved everything this morning,” Albina said. “She was up very early. She has been managing the whole thing herself, really and is very good at it. You have noticed that about her, I imagine.”
“She is capable.”
