Page 121 of A Shadow Amongst the Roses

“What did you see?” she asked.

“That you would never take his hand,” he said.

“I knew you were there,” she said. “Not at first. But the garden changed. Hartleigh knows you now.”

Something in his expression shifted.

“What did it feel like,” she asked, “to let me go?

“And I chose neither,” she agreed. “At some point I felt you behind him. I do not know when. The garden spoke before you did. The way the roses shifted. The way the air altered. Hartleigh has learned you. It knows where you stand.”

He stared at her as if she had handed him something he had not expected to receive.

“Eliza,” he said.

She stepped nearer again. They stood a little off from the window now, closer to the center of the room. The candlelight touched both their faces.

“What did it feel like for you?” she asked. “When I told you not to follow me?”

He exhaled slowly.

“As if someone had removed a wall from a house while I was still inside it,” he said. “Everything still stood, yet nothing felt sound.”

Her eyes stung. She did not look away.

“And yet you stood there and let me go,” she said.

“Because you had asked it,” he said. “I told myself I trusted you. I told myself this was a plan we had made together. I told myself a dozen things that sounded like sense. None of them took away the knowledge that if you chose to keep walking, if you chose not to look back, I would have built the means for you to leave me.”

Her voice came out softer on the next words.

“And when you saw me step away from your hand.”

His jaw tightened.

“That was not acting,” he said. “For either of us.”

“No,” she whispered.

He reached up and touched his own chest as if something there still felt bruised.

“I had thought,” he said slowly, “that nothing would cut as sharp as that first day when you stepped across Hartleigh’s threshold and I knew I had let you into a life I could not promise would protect you. I was wrong. Watching you step away from me tonight, knowing I had given you cause in truth once and in pretense now, it took more out of me than any fight I have ever seen.”

“Why did you not say so before?” she asked.

“Because we needed Ashwood to believe what he saw,” he said. “Because Nathaniel and Eleanor needed the pieces to move as planned. Because there was no time.”

She swallowed again.

“And now?” she asked. “Is there time now?”

He moved toward her then. Not with the suddenness of the garden. Slowly. Careful as if any sharp motion might break the moment.

He stopped when there was less than an arm’s length between them.

“You asked earlier if I know how you are made,” he said. “Let me tell you something about how I am made. I can stand still in a storm and hold a ship steady. I can walk into a house where I am not wanted and do what must be done for the sake of those who live there. I can bear a great many things with silence.”

He paused.