“A baroness,” Geoffrey clarified, though the slight shift at the corner of his mouth suggested he understood perfectly well how little clarification that provided. “They have been corresponding regarding estate matters.”
“Of course they have.”
“Extensively, it seems.”
I glanced toward Aldwin, who was pretending very hard not to hear us while Eleanor abandoned leaf transportation entirely in favor of throwing mud directly at a tree.
Something in him had changed over the years. Not healed entirely. I wasn’t certain grief ever truly healed. But he laughed more easily now. The silences around him no longer felt hollowed-out in quite the same way.
“That’s good,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” Geoffrey agreed. “I believe it is.”
By evening, rain had begun falling softly against the castle walls. Eleanor finally exhausted herself shortly after supper and allowed us to carry her upstairs half asleep against Geoffrey’sshoulder clutching a deeply unfortunate frog-shaped carving she had become emotionally attached to sometime earlier that week.
“She named it Archbishop,” Geoffrey informed me quietly as we crossed the corridor.
“Why?”
“I did not ask.”
Wise man.
Later, after Eleanor had surrendered fully to sleep beneath linen blankets embroidered by women who would never understand the impossible chain of events that had brought me there, Geoffrey stood beside the bed watching her.
Candlelight softened the sharp lines of his face. He still looked at Eleanor sometimes with visible astonishment, as though some part of him remained unconvinced she was entirely real. Perhaps some part of me did too.
“Harper,” he said quietly.
I looked up.
For a moment he adjusted Eleanor’s blanket unnecessarily, smoothing fabric already perfectly smooth.
“Do you regret it?”
The question settled softly into the room between us. I looked at our daughter sleeping safely beneath handmade quilts while rain whispered softly beyond the shutters.
Then I looked at Geoffrey. At the man who had once stood in a chapel and offered me freedom even when it cost him dearly to do so.
“No.”
Something shifted immediately in his expression, small enough another person might have missed it entirely.
“No?” he repeated quietly.
“I remember my old life,” I said softly. “All of it. The noise and the lights and my work. My friends. Coffee.”
That earned the smallest flicker of amusement from him.
“And I grieved it,” I admitted. “I think part of me always will.”
Honesty mattered with Geoffrey. It always had.
“But this became my life.” I reached for his hand. “You became my life.”
The room went very still.
“I chose this,” I whispered. “I chose you. And if I stood again in that archive knowing everything that would happen afterward…”
