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“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” Laura said, and had to stop there.

She met Nathaniel’s eyes and saw in them something she had never once seen in the first year she had known him.

There is a man looking at the future without flinching.

They arrived home late, Iris asleep against Nathaniel’s shoulder, with a paper bag of toffee still clutched in one fist and her dreadful tin whistle safely confiscated.

They put her to bed without her waking, only murmuring something about mustaches and coconuts as they tucked the blankets around her. It was well past midnight before the house went fully quiet, many of the servants having taken leave for a few hours to enjoy the festivities.

Laura lay with her head on Nathaniel’s chest, his hand absently stroking her hair, as the stars twinkled through the window pane.

“I keep thinking about our wedding night,” she said. “The three rules.”

“Don’t. Not now.”

“No, no! I’m not upset by it. That’s rather my point.” She lifted her head to look at him. “I remember sitting there thinking this is what my life will be like now, and I remember deciding I would survive it, and that surviving would have to be enough. Can you believe that now, seeing where we’ve ended up?”

“Well, I never told you this, but I was so frightened of you that night at the auction,” Nathaniel admitted quietly.

“Frightened?” she echoed, surprised.

“I looked at you on that stage, and a part of me knew that there was potential. But once I saw you standing across your room, I understood that if I let you anywhere near me, you’d worm your way past my defenses, and everything I’d built to keep myself upright would come down.”

“Ah,” she murmured.

“Yes, so I gave you rules instead.” His hand stilled in her hair. “It was the most cowardly thing I have ever done.”

“They only lasted about six weeks.”

“Five, I think, if we’re being accurate. You broke the one about the west tower within a month, and I never had the spine to enforce the others.” He was smiling; she could hear it in his inflection. “I should have known. You came to that auction terrified out of your mind and looked me right in the eye anyway. Nobody had done that in years.”

Laura settled back against him. “What do you want for her? Or him. For April.”

“Everything,” Nathaniel said without hesitation. “I want them to grow up in a house where the doors stay open. I want them to know their Aunt Isabella’s name and know it as a name, not a wound. I want them to argue with me at the dinner table and be right, occasionally, and know that being right won’t cost them anything.” He paused. “And I want them to have Iris, and Iris to have them, so that if anything ever happens to either of us, neither of them is ever alone in it the way she was.”

“Nothing is going to happen to either of us,” she assured him.

“I know. I want it anyway.”

Laura laced her fingers through his and drew his hand down to rest flat against her stomach, where there was nothing yet to feel and wouldn’t be for months.

“I have a name in mind, if it’s a girl,” she murmured. “I don’t want to impose it, and I’ll not be hurt if it’s too much⁠—”

“Isabella,” he said.

“Isabella.”

He was quiet for a long moment, and she felt his chest rise and fall beneath her cheek.

“She’d have liked you so much, angel,” he rasped. “I’ve thought that a hundred times this year. She’d have taken your side in every argument we’ve ever had, on principle, and enjoyed it thoroughly.”

“Iris told me that, once, the first week I was here. She said her mama would have liked me.” Laura smiled in the dark. “I didn’t believe her at the time. I thought she was being kind to a stranger.”

“Iris has never once in her life said a thing she didn’t mean.”

“No,” she agreed. “She hasn’t. I know that now.”

Nathaniel pressed a kiss to her hair. “Go to sleep,” he said. “We have a great deal to do before April.”