James said nothing.
William kicked another stone. This one went further, skittering off into the frost-stiff grass at the edge of the drive.
“I’ve known you since we were boys,” he murmured. “I watched you build a particular life. Comfortable. Light. Nothing that asked too much of you and nothing you asked too much of in return.” He paused. “I never thought less of you for it. It made sense, given what you had. I understood it.”
“There’s a but coming.”
“There’s a but coming,” William agreed. “But I’ve been here for three days, James, and I’ve watched you in a way I have not had the occasion to in fifteen years.” He drew to a halt, and James stopped beside him. “I’ve watched you move your chair without noticing you’d done it. I’ve watched you finish Isadora’s sentences at the card table like you’ve been doing it for years instead of weeks. I watched you yesterday morning carry Violet around the breakfast room because she would not settle, and you did not even glance at the clock, which is not a thing the James I grew up with would have done. The James I grew up with checked his pocket watch if a conversation ran four minutes over what he’d allotted it.”
“I do not carry a pocket watch as often now.”
“That’s not actually reassuring, given the context.”
James almost smiled.
“Say what you came out here to say, William.”
William looked at him for a long moment. The cold had put color in his face, or perhaps it was simply the seriousness he was working up to, the one James had seen perhaps a dozen times in their friendship and had learned to take seriously every time.
“She has spent her whole life protecting her heart,” he said. “You know that. You sat across from me in my own study a monthago and told me you knew exactly what kind of woman you were asking to marry you, and I believed you when you said you understood the gravity of it.” He let that sit between them. “I am asking you now whether you still understand it. Because I think something is changing between the two of you, whether either of you has said so aloud or not.”
James looked at the trees.
“And if it is,” William continued, “I need you to understand something, and I need you to hear it from me directly rather than discover it the difficult way.” His voice did not rise. “If you hurt her—if you let this become something and then retreat from it, or manage it the way you manage everything else, at a careful distance, until she’s given you more than you were ever willing to give back—I will not forgive it. Not as your friend. Not as anyone’s friend. I will not forgive you, James, and I want you to know that before anything else happens between you, not after.”
The wind moved through the bare trees at the edge of the drive.
James said nothing for a moment.
“I understand,” he said.
“I do not think you do. Not entirely.” Something shifted in William’s expression, the formality of the warning giving way to something more uncertain, more honestly afraid. “Actually… Do you know what actually worries me? It is not whether you care for her. I think you do. I’ve watched you for days, and I think youcare for her more than you’ve worked out how to say—possibly more than you’ve admitted to yourself.”
James clenched his jaw so hard he thought it would break.
“What worries me,” Williams continued, “is whether you’ll let yourself keep caring. Whether six months from now, when it is no longer new and it’s started to cost you something, you’ll go back to being the man who keeps everyone at exactly the distance that cannot hurt him. The man who’s charming and careless and impossible to really reach, because reaching you was never worth the risk.” His jaw ticked. “I’ve known that man for years, James. I like him. I’ve defended him to people who did not understand him. But I will not stand by and watch him do that to my sister.”
The words landed somewhere James did not have ready access to.
He looked at the frost on the grass. His eyes watered, and he pinched the bridge of his nose. He took steadying breaths before speaking.
“I would never deliberately hurt her.” It came out soft and quiet.
William studied him.
“I believe that,” he said finally. “I do not think you’d ever deliberately do it. That was never what worried me.” He paused. “It’s the nondeliberate hurting I’d watch out for. The slow one.The one where you do not decide anything at all and simply stop choosing her, the way you’ve never had to choose anyone before because no one ever taught you how.”
James held his gaze and said nothing, because there was nothing he could say that would also be comfortable, and he had stopped, somewhere in the last several weeks, being willing to offer the comfortable thing over the true one.
William seemed to read this. He nodded once, slowly.
“All right,” he said lightly.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all I came out here to say.” He looked back toward the house, where the nurse was now herding Thomas, who had strayed toward the flowers, back to the carriage. “I’m not going to lecture you for an hour. I think you heard me.”
“I heard you.”
