“Want him.”
“Then tell him so. Dogs appreciate sincerity.”
Thomas shook his head, but when Georgiana patted the carpet, he lay flat on his stomach, put his face level with Harley’s, and said, with perfect seriousness: “Harley. You mine. Come.”
The puppy’s tail wagged harder. A moment later, he wriggled free and launched himself at the toddler, all paws and tongue and wriggling hindquarters. Boy and dog rolled together on the Aubusson rug in a tangle that would have given Mrs. Reynolds palpitations.
Elizabeth concealed her smile, quill poised, as her chest filled with a warmth she resolved to record in memory, if not in her list.
He bought the puppy without a moment’s hesitation. I believe the transaction was concluded before I had finished speaking. He saw Thomas’s joy and produced his purse as though the two were naturally connected—as though making a child happy required no deliberation whatsoever, only the means and the will.
He brought me wildflowers yesterday. They were slightly crushed, and he presented them with the air of a man delivering diplomatic correspondence, but they were wildflowers nonetheless, picked (I suspect) during his morning ride and concealed in his coat pocket for several hours. He did not acknowledge the romance of the gesture. He merely said, “These were growing near the stream,” as though this explained everything.
He also reads to Thomas before bed. I discovered this by accident, passing the nursery and hearing his voice through the door. He was reading from a book of Greek myths, which seems rather advanced for a two-year-old, but Thomas appeared to be listening with grave attention. When I mentioned it at breakfast, he changed the subject.
“Lizba!” Thomas extracted himself from Georgiana and toddled toward her with Harley, scrambling, his paws not quite matching his ambitions. “What doing?”
Elizabeth slid theDear Janestationery over her journal. “A letter to my sister.”
“Want see.”
She tickled his curls, all askew on his head. “Dear, it is frightfully dull. All weather and compliments.”
“Want see.” He had reached her knee and attempted to climb, his small fingers grasping at the writing desk with the determination of a mountaineer.
“Thomas.” Georgiana picked up the puppy. “Shall we take Harley to the garden? Perhaps we can find Sidney the Snail and make our acquaintance.”
“Snail?” Thomas paused, weighing the relative merits of Lizba’s correspondence against the real Sidney. “Harley come?”
“Harley will certainly come, as he is an excellent sniffer of snails,” Georgiana reassured.
Thomas released his grip on Elizabeth’s knee and placed his tiny hand in Georgiana’s, though not before casting her a look that suggested he was not entirely fooled by the cover-up stationery.
“Say goodbye to Lizba,” Georgiana prompted.
“Bye, Lizba.” He waved with the hand not occupied by Georgiana. “Later, see Lizba paper.”
Elizabeth watched them depart in a tangle of puppy and laughter, Georgiana’s voice drifting back as she instructed Thomas in the finer points of snail surveillance.
The room settled into quiet as Elizabeth removed the stationery from her journal and returned to her list.
He calls me essential, she wrote, and paused with her quill suspended, savoring the word as one might savor the last bite of something unexpectedly sweet.
Essential.A man might call a woman beautiful and be speaking of nothing more than the arrangement of her features. He might call her beloved and mean only that she had secured his passing fancy. But essential meant that without her, he ceased to function.
And the way he said it. The roughness in his voice, as though the word had to be dragged from a place he did not usually permit visitors. The intensity in his eyes. The pause before he spoke, selecting the word with the care another man might give to selecting a ring.
I begin to understand him. His reserve conceals depths I had not fathomed. He feels a great deal—perhaps more than he knows what to do with—and discipline is merely his method of management. When he does speak, the words carry weight precisely because they come from such depths.
I had thought I was accepting a practical arrangement. I find I have stumbled into something far more dangerous.
She paused, rereading what she had written. This was hardly the sort of list she’d originally created for her observation—all wit and irony—held at arm’s length. This was something else entirely. A confession, perhaps. A map of her own changing heart, drawn while she was too busy falling to notice she had begun.
I believe I may be in love with my husband.
The words looked as startling on the page as they felt in her chest.
I did not expect this. I had not prepared myself for it. But the evidence accumulates daily, and I am too honest a creature to deny what it plainly suggests.
