“I spent a great deal of time in other people’s houses, being adequately managed. Fed and clothed and delivered where I was supposed to be delivered.” He stopped. “The people were not unkind. That is the thing I have never known how to explain. They were not unkind. They simply looked at me the way people look at things they are responsible for.” He paused. “Not things they chose.”
Isadora felt her heart clench at his words.
“The thought of Violet growing up in someone else’s house, being adequate, being managed by people who are perfectly decent and perfectly correct and who look at her the way my father’s cousins looked at me—” His jaw tightened. “I will not have it. Whatever I am or fail to be, that I will not have.”
She looked at his profile. At the set of his jaw and the daisy he had kept turning in his fingers without thinking, and the fury underneath his composure, clean and old and entirely certain.
“She will never feel that,” she assured him. “She does not. Children feel it in the arms that hold them, the voices that come back, the people who stay when they do not have to.” She paused. “You always come back, James, even when she is making you feel entirely useless. Even when you do not know what you’re doing, you come back.” She met his eyes. “She knows.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked back at the lake, and she saw him absorb her words. She returned to the ruined flower chain, giving him the space to do it.
A bird flew across the water.
“You’ve thought about this,” he noted.
“I watched my brother do it.” She shrugged. “For years. He comes back regardless. I know what it means.” She paused. “She is lucky, even if she cannot see it yet.”
The lake sat still. Somewhere along the path, Mrs. Plum was commenting on a wildflower. Violet’s babbling carried through the air.
“She has you,” James said after a while. “You know that. Entirely and without conditions.”
“She has us both,” Isadora reminded him. “Do not think I have not noticed the flowers on your knee.”
“Those were gifts. I was being polite.”
“You kept all of them.”
He looked down at his knee, at the small accumulation of daisies that he had kept without once showing any sign of putting it down.
“They were formally presented.” He shrugged with a smile.
She laughed. He looked at her when she did it.
“We should go back.”
He rose to his feet and offered her his hand, which was either habit or occasion. She took it.
They turned toward the path and fell into step beside each other with ease. Mrs. Plum was already making her way back with Violet and what appeared to be a thin stick.
The path narrowed near the curve. Isadora turned her head to say something about Mrs. Plum and the wildflowers and the thin stick. James turned toward her at the same moment.
They were so close that his hand brushed hers lightly.
The path, the light, the gradual shrinking of the distance between them—she could not pinpoint the moment it had happened, only that it did.
His face was close enough that she could see his expression, which was not composed or managed or any of the versions she had learned to read at a distance.
He was looking at her the way he had looked at her on the garden path, as though she were the fixed point.
His eyes dropped to her mouth, and she swallowed, unable to stop the heat from spreading across her face. And then, without warning, he leaned in.
Just slightly. Just the fraction of an inch that meant everything without saying anything, that lived entirely in the space between what was true and what had not yet been said.
She felt it the way she had felt his hand on her waist on the garden path, the way she had felt his proximity at the dinner table, the way she felt most things about him that she was not supposed to be feeling.
She did not step back.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Plum’s voice sounded from ten feet away, and Isadora jumped, putting distance between them. “She has found a stick. She will not be parted from it.”
