Agnes shot us both a look.
I smiled. “We will not go too far.”
“Hopeless,” she muttered, though affection warmed the word.
Nicholas helped me to my feet, his thumb brushing once over my knuckles before he tucked my hand into the crook of his arm, and the simple contact sent a gentle warmth through my chest. It was astonishing, really, that after all we had survived, after all the blood and horror and revelation, his touch still undid me so easily.
We had taken only a few steps down the path when Hawthorne appeared from between the rose bushes.
The strange stiffness had not left him entirely, and perhaps it never would. His limbs still carried that eerie, gentle grace, as though each motion required consultation with some internal system neither human nor plant. Yet there was awareness in him now, steadier than before. His dark eyes no longer slid past the world. They held to it. They chose what to see.
In his long hands, he carried a rose—a single bloom, deep red and freshly cut, its stem stripped carefully of thorns.
He stopped before me and held it out.
Roses, I now remembered, had always been my favorite.
I looked from the flower to Hawthorne, and something tender and painful unfurled inside me.
“Thank you,” I whispered, my vision blurring with tears I refused to acknowledge.
Hawthorne blinked once, slow and solemn.
I took the rose from him, careful not to crush the petals. They were velvet-soft, layered tightly around a darkcenter, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I did not imagine how they would rot. I did not picture the edges blackening, the stem softening, the earth reclaiming them with indifferent hunger.
I thought of the brass rose-handle on our bedchamber door, and how Nicholas had shaped metal into a flower that would never wilt for our first anniversary.
I thought of every life this house had tried to preserve, every beautiful thing love had ruined and remade.
Hawthorne lowered himself onto the grass near Agnes’s bench with the grave satisfaction of a creature who had completed some important duty. Agnes immediately reached down to smooth one hand over his hair, pretending not to cry.
Nicholas watched them for a moment, his expression quietly undone.
“He forgives you,” he said softly.
I looked at the rose. “I know.”
His eyes met mine. The grief I had once watched there returned, but for a different reason now.
“It was not your fault.”
“I know,” I said again, though the words caught in my throat this time.
Nicholas and I had never really discussed everything that had happened to me after I lost my memory—those crucial moments between waking in our greenhouse with his lips on mine and waking in the hospital were the only memories I had lost for good. He had offered more than once, but I had not been ready to hear the truth.
But now I was.
“Will you tell me?”
He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded. “If that is what you want.”
“I think I need to know.”
His jaw tightened, shame coloring his voice. “After I kissed you, you became confused and frightened, so I sedated you. I could not bear to see you looking at me with such fear or watch you panic when I tried to explain who you were and what you had done. So I used the compound I had developed for Hawthorne and put you to sleep. I tied the ribbon around your throat, then I took you to the hospital.”
He glanced away, staring into the painful memories. “Mr. Finch helped establish the story of your collapse and mysterious illness. I paid the physicians to go along with it and made certain you had everything you needed while I watched from a distance. But I never gave up hope. I began researching memory loss, hoping to create a compound that would bring you back to me.”
He paused, taking a deep breath and running his fingers through his hair. “Then he told me your condition was deteriorating and you were becoming desperate for answers, so we arranged for you to see my advertisement. I thought that I could fix it.”
