"She was," Genevieve said simply. "She is. Whatever else, she was always genuinely talented, and I was always genuinely proud of her." She looked ahead at the tree line, which was getting closer. "Now. Tell me about this forest. Is it as beautiful as it looks from the upstairs window, or is that simply the distance flattering it?"
It worked. She felt the moment it worked, the way he let out a breath that was almost a laugh, the way his shoulders shifted, the way he looked at the trees with an expression that was suddenly, quietly, something she had not yet seen on him in full, which was simple uncomplicated pleasure.
"It is better," he said.
And it was. The path wound through birch and old oak, the light coming through in long angled shafts, the ground soft underfoot and the air smelling of cold water and autumn leaves and something older underneath that was just the smell of old woodland being itself. She understood immediately why he belonged there. It had the same quality as his study, the same sense of a place that had absorbed the character of the person who loved it.
They dismounted at the edge of a shallow stream to let the horses drink, and he helped her down with his hands at her waist, and the contact lasted slightly longer than it was strictly necessary for the purposes of dismounting, and she was aware of it in a way that she was certain he was also aware of it, and then she was on the ground and they were standing quite close together and looking at the stream.
"The flooding is along here," he said, after a moment. "About half a mile north. The ground looks solid but it is not."
"I will remember," she said. Her voice came out slightly more quietly than she had intended.
He did not immediately step back, and neither did she.
"This part of the estate," he said, in the tone of someone choosing to talk about something because talking about something was easier than the alternative, "was the part my grandfather planted. Most of the oaks are his. He apparently spent the last twenty years of his life planting things he would never see fully grown, which I always thought was either very wise or very optimistic and I have never quite decided which."
"Both," Genevieve said. "Wisdom and optimism are not opposites." She looked up at the canopy, the light coming through in moving pieces. "He planted them for you, even though he did not know it was you yet."
There was a silence. She looked back at him to find him watching her with an expression she had not seen before, open and undefended in a way that her chest did something immediately and without consulting her.
"Yes," he said quietly. "I suppose he did."
The horses shifted on the bank. The stream moved over its stones with the small persistent sound of water doing what water does, and the light moved in the trees, and Genevieve thought that she was standing in the right place, for the first time in a long time, and that the distance between parallel lines was perhaps not as fixed as she had believed.
She did not say any of that aloud. She smiled at him instead, and he smiled back, and they stood there a moment longer before turning back to the horses.
It was, she thought, a beginning.
Chapter 12
The months moved in the way that good months did, which was to say quickly and without announcing themselves, each week folding into the next with the comfortable inevitability of something that had found its natural pace and settled into it.
Genevieve noticed it first at the stables. She had been visiting the horses, making sure the gardener’s cat was not frustrating them, when he arrived.
"Good morning," she said.
"Morning." He stopped at the fence and looked out at Mira with the focused attention of a man who had a genuine interest in horses and was not using the horse as an excuse to stand there. Or so she had decided. She reserved the right to revise that opinion.
"She is going very well," Genevieve offered.
"She is." A pause. "You have been working with her on the left lead."
Genevieve looked at him. He was still watching Mira.
"I have. You noticed."
"She was favoring the right when you arrived." He glanced at Genevieve briefly, then back at the horse. "It's improved considerably."
This was, she had come to understand, high praise from Thomas. The kind of praise that did not announce itself but arrived quietly and meant more for that reason. She filed it away in the category she had mentally labeled things Thomas says that are actually larger than they appear, which had become a reasonably well-populated category over the preceding weeks.
"I will tell her you said so," Genevieve said. "She will be very pleased."
The corner of his mouth did that thing it sometimes did. Not quite a smile. The precursor to one. She had become, she realized, extremely attentive to the corner of his mouth.
He stayed for twenty minutes, which she did not mention and neither did he. He came back on Thursday. And then the following Monday. And then it became simply a thing that happened on mornings when the weather was good; his appearing at the fence with no announcement and no stated purpose, and she found it so perfectly, unreasonably charming that she had eventually been obliged to have a quiet word with herself about it.
He is being neighborly, she had told herself, firmly. He is being a considerate husband. This is what you wanted. Do not make it into more than it is.