A tear, small and entirely unwelcome, spilled down her cheek with the calm inevitability of something that had been decided.
“That is—” She dashed the back of her hand across her face. “This is completely?—”
Another tear fell.
Violet looked at her with the intent expression she wore when something was happening that she did not fully understand but was taking very seriously.
“I am fine.” Isadora gave a watery laugh. “I am perfectly fine.”
She wasnotfine.
Violet reached up and patted her cheek. Isadora looked at her, and she did it again.
“Thank you,” Isadora murmured, with slightly unsteady dignity.
Violet seemed satisfied and returned to Sebastian.
Isadora sat for a moment in the aftermath of it—the tears retreating, the feeling still entirely present but no longer quite so overwhelming, the way a storm settled into something quieter without disappearing.
She pressed her lips together. “What is wrong with me? What am I thinking? He went to London to protect you.”
Violet looked up again.
“He went because Mortimer is threatening to take you away, and he will not allow it. The only way to stop it is to go and uncoverthe truth about those letters before Mortimer can use them. Yet here I am, worried and bothered about another woman.” Isadora paused. “He did not go because of another woman. He went because of this one.” She looked at Violet. “He went because of you.”
The baby offered her Archibald again. This time, Isadora took him properly.
“I am being ridiculous,” she laughed weakly.
Violet appeared to withhold judgment on that.
“I am being paranoid and ridiculous, and I have spent the afternoon crying on a terrace with a baby present about a man who has given me absolutely no evidence of anything except…” Isadora considered. “Except consistently showing up. Which is, it turns out, the thing I find most difficult to trust.” She looked at the wooden horse in her hand. “Because I grew up watching someone stop showing up, and I decided very early that the safest thing was to not need anyone to show up in the first place.” She paused. “That is Cecily’s theory. She is correct. I find it very irritating when she is correct.”
The afternoon light was dimming, the sky shifting from pale gold to the grey-blue of early evening.
“He forgot to say goodbye,” she said again. But it came out differently this time, with less weight in it and more of the observation of someone filing something honestly. “Which was… not ideal. And I would like him to know that.” She noddedto herself. “When he returns, I will tell him. Calmly. Without crying. Unlike this afternoon, which we will not be discussing with anyone.”
Violet cooed.
“I mean it,” Isadora insisted. “This stays between us. You cannot tell James I cried on the terrace.”
Violet looked at her with a toothy grin.
“You are just a baby,” Isadora sighed. “You cannot actually tell anyone anything yet.”
Violet babbled something at length and with conviction.
“That is not reassuring,” Isadora said. “That sounded like a great deal of information.”
She looked at the rosevine. The remaining blooms were darker now in the fading light; the deep pink turned into something richer, the way colors changed at this hour.
“He is coming back,” she said quietly to the vine, or to herself, or to Violet, or perhaps to no one and all of them. “He is coming back because Ashbourne is his home now, and Violet is here, and I…” She hesitated. “And I am here.”
The unease was still there. She was not going to pretend it wasn’t. It sat in the corner of everything, small and persistent, the worry that distance would undo something proximity had built.
She did not entirely know how to trust the thing she was feeling, because trusting it meant trusting James, and trusting him meant being vulnerable in a way she had avoided her entire adult life.
But she was in love with him regardless.
