“You considered it.”
Silence confirmed the answer.
I crossed toward the altar carefully, resisting the deeply irrational instinct to position myself between Harper and the manuscript as though I could defend her from a book.
The psalter pulsed again beneath the candlelight.
My skin prickled. I had spent most of my life believing every problem yielded eventually to sufficient analysis. Military strategy. Political alliances. Supply failures. Human behavior. Even uncertainty itself could usually be reduced into probabilities. But there was no tactical framework for a manuscript that moved women across centuries.
“What does it want?” I asked.
Harper laughed softly without humor. “That’s an extremely concerning question.”
“You believe it wants something.”
“Yes.”
Father William made the sign of the cross.
I ignored him.
Harper stepped closer to the altar before stopping herself again. I noticed the hesitation immediately. Like someone resisting a current.
“The last time it glowed like this,” she said carefully, “I ended up here.”
The chapel went still. A draft moved through the narrow windows, stirring candle flame and incense smoke, and I became suddenly, sharply aware of the distance between Harper and the psalter.
Too close. Not close enough. I disliked both possibilities equally.
“You think it may happen again,” I said.
“I don’t know what I think.” She rubbed a hand across her forehead tiredly. “Everything about this feels connected to timing. Runnymede. The charter.”
“Less than a sen’night now,” Father William murmured.
“Yes,” Harper said quietly.
I looked down at the manuscript again.
A few weeks ago, Harper Ainsley had not existed in my world. Now she occupied an increasingly dangerous amount of my attention.
I had begun unconsciously searching for her in crowded rooms. Listening for her voice during meals. Altering the course of my day around conversations that should have remained purely strategic.
I understood attraction. Neither admiration nor desire was unfamiliar to me. But this felt less like desire and more like disruption. Like some careful internal balance shifting one degree at a time beneath my feet. And now the manuscript threatening to remove her from my life produced a reaction in me that felt uncomfortably close to fear.
That realization landed heavily enough I almost stepped back from it.
Harper was watching the psalter again.
“Do you want to go home?” I asked. The question escaped before I fully intended to ask it.
Harper looked toward me slowly. “Yes,” she said at first. Then she hesitated.
I noticed immediately. I was becoming dangerously good at noticing her hesitations.
“I miss things from my world constantly,” she admitted. “Comfortable things. Familiar things. Coffee. Music. Indoor plumbing.”
“Your devotion to plumbing remains remarkable.”
