“Ah,” he murmured.
“She’s decided you need more flowers than I do,” Isadora observed.
“She is correcting an imbalance.” He looked at the small pile on his knee. “Though I’m not sure what imbalance this is meant to address.”
“Perhaps she thinks you look like you need cheering up.”
“I was not aware I looked like I needed cheering up.”
“You have a very serious face,” Isadora said. “She may have taken it personally.”
He looked at her. She looked at the flower chain she was making, which was coming along well and which she was devoting approximately fifteen percent of her attention to.
“My face is—” he began.
Violet chose that moment to lean forward from her seated position, overbalance entirely, and end up face-down in the flowers. James hurriedly righted her, waving a flower to distract her.
She lifted her head and looked at him. He looked back at her with an expression of great concern. Then he wiggled his eyebrows and pouted his lips. She kept staring at him, and he did it again until she burst out laughing.
It was a full laugh, one that shook her whole body. She laughed until she ran out of breath and then laughed again.
James made the face a third time.
The third laugh was worse, if anything. She collapsed sideways onto the blanket and laughed at the sky.
Isadora had stopped making the flower chain. She was looking at him, while he was looking at Violet with an expression that was open and warm and entirely unguarded, the expression of a man who had been caught off guard by his own delight and had no interest in recovering from it.
He made the face again. Violet grabbed his hand and held it to her face, still laughing. He let her.
Isadora looked at the lake. She needed somewhere to direct her expression, and the lake was reliably neutral.
You are in a great deal of trouble.
After a while, Mrs. Plum rose from her chair. “We saw some very fine wildflowers along the path on the way down,” she said.
Violet was already crawling toward her. “Ta-ta.”
“Of course,” Isadora allowed.
Mrs. Plum lifted the baby and set off along the lake path, recounting a tale as she went. Violet was already pointing at something in the distance, babbling as they went.
Silence settled.
James was staring at the lake with the relaxed posture he had arrived at somewhere in the past hour without Isadora noticing, his hair tousled by the wind.
Suddenly, she realized how rarely she saw him like this.
She began dismantling the flower chain without purpose, needing something to do with her hands.
“I did not expect that it would feel like this,” James sighed.
She waited for him to continue.
“I did not expect to care about her this way.” He turned the daisy once more in his fingers. “I expected—I thought it would feel like responsibility. Something to be managed correctly.” He paused. “She grabbed my coat on the third day I met her. Just… grabbed the lapels and held on and looked at me as though she had already concluded something I had not been consulted about.”He took a breath. “I had not decided anything yet, and she had apparently decided everything.”
Isadora said nothing. She understood he was not finished.
“My father died when I was seventeen.” He kept his eyes on the water. “Old enough, people said. As though age alone could determine someone’s readiness.” A pause. “We were strangers by then. Had been for years. But before that, I was young enough that I still wanted him to be different.” He looked down at the daisy.
