Page 120 of A Shadow Amongst the Roses

“Enough to remind me I am not dreaming,” he said. “No more than that.”

Her throat tightened.

“I watched you hit him,” she said. “It felt like something that had been waiting to happen.”

“It had,” he answered. “He has moved around this house like smoke. It was time he met something that did not move aside.”

Silence settled. The candle crackled. The fire in the small grate had burned low. The window showed only a smear of darker black where the roses lay.

“We should talk about what we did,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

He did not begin.

“When did you think of it?” she asked. “The plan. Was it when you saw the marks in the rose bed. Or before that.”

“After,” he said. “I stood under that window and knew someone had been there. I knew why a man like Ashwood would choose that spot. It gave him our voices without our eyes. It gave him the illusion of distance.”

He looked toward the glass again.

“I thought of what would draw him out,” he said. “What would make him step beyond listen.”

“Conflict,” she said quietly.

“Yes.”

He turned back to her.

“I would not have suggested it if you had not already held the thing in your mind,” he said. “You told me how it felt to be shut out of the truth. I knew you were carrying more than you said.”

“You used it,” she said quietly.

“I asked if you would,” he corrected. “I would not have pressed you.”

“And if I had refused.”

“It would not have worked,” he said. “Not in time.”

She folded her arms beneath her cloak, not defensively, but to keep herself still.

“When I walked out,” she said, “it was not a performance. I thought of every time my life had been decided for me. You asked me to stand inside that feeling again.”

“I did not ask you to feel it,” he said. “Only to look as if you did.”

“That is not how I am made,” she said. “You must know that. I cannot pull a mask over my head and expect my heart to remain unchanged beneath it. I felt it. I believed every word I spoke. That was the only way it would read as true.”

His hand left the sill. He flexed the bruised knuckles once.

“I know,” he said.

She stepped closer.

“Do you?” she asked. “When I told you not to follow me it felt final. Not strategic. When I walked into the roses it felt like the end of something that had taken root between us and broken off at the stem.”

His expression did not shift. His eyes did.

“I followed,” he said. “Every step I have ever taken in that garden put me where I needed to be. None of it mattered if you had not been honest.”