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“She doesn’t trust him yet,” Juliet said.

“No,” Adam said. “She’s a sensible woman.”

“She’s going to trust him eventually.”

He looked at the garden. “Daniel,” he said, “does not stop at anything he’s decided he wants. He is extremely tiresome about it.”

“Very tiresome,” Juliet agreed.

She watched Valerie press her lips together against something Daniel had just said, trying and so obviously failing to conceal her amusement. Her parasol had not moved; it was still at the wrong angle for the sun, but neither of them appeared to have noticed.

“She deserves someone who doesn’t stop,” Juliet said, and Adam turned his head to look at her.

“Someone who stays,” she said, and was aware, as she said it, that she was no longer talking about Daniel…but she was too shy to say it to the person she truly wanted to hear it.

She found herself hoping that he’d heard it, regardless.

The property sat two hours out on the Hampshire Road. It was an old hunting box with stone walls soft with moss and grounds that ran down through oak to a lake that caught the afternoon sky and turned it back in pieces.

Eloise saw it from the carriage window and stopped talking.

She had been cataloging every hedgerow and flock since London with the systematic thoroughness of a surveyor who has found fieldwork unexpectedly rewarding. Then the track crested the rise and the water appeared below, silver and wide in the afternoon, and she went completely silent with her nose pressed to the glass.

“It’s enormous,” she said finally, in a voice that did not match her size.

“It’s a reasonable lake,” Adam said.

“He’s being modest,” Juliet said.

Eloise shot her father the look she reserved for adults who deliberately underplayed things. Then she pressed her nose back to the glass and did not move again until the carriage stopped.

They changed at the house. Eloise got into an old cotton dress that Mrs. Priscilla had designated expendable, Juliet into a plain linen skirt and a loose gardening shirt she hadn’t worn since Ravenlocke. When she came out onto the lawn with her hair pinned back, Adam was already at the water’s edge, his coat gone, his shirt sleeves rolled back once, his boots set in the grass beside him.

He was looking at the lake.

She stopped a few steps behind him. His shoulders moved with his breathing. She thought of what he had told her: the search party, the surface of the water, Eloise on the bank with her hands full of mud…and she admitted her fear that he would be unable to do this today.

But after a moment, he stepped in, and the water came to his shins. Juliet’s eyes widened, her heart thundering in her chest. Why was she so nervous for him? Why…why did it matter to her as though she’d been the one who’d gone through that terrible ordeal?

Then Eloise came at a run from the house, dress gathered in both fists, and flung herself at the bank with a shout that scattered the geese from the reeds halfway across the water.

“Papa! You’re already in!”

“I’m verifying conditions,” he said, and his voice wasn’t in any way distressed. At least, not as far as she could hear.

Eloise looked at Juliet with a bewildered yet excited expression. “Is it cold?”

“Oh, it’s very cold,” he said. “You should both come in immediately.”

“There is something deeply suspicious,” Juliet said, “about how you said that.”

He turned to flash her a smile and, with the late sun behind him, his expression was not what she would call innocent.

“Come and see,” he said, insisting.

Eloise had already shed her shoes and waded in up to her knees. The shout she produced on contact removed any further ambiguity about the temperature. “It is not cold at all!” she announced, with the certainty of a person who has committed to a position and will defend it.

“It is absolutely cold,” Juliet told her.