He had thought about it more than was sensible. He had thought about it the night before, specifically, when he had been attempting to read and had found himself on the same page for twenty minutes without absorbing a single sentence.
He turned away from the window and sat down at his desk.
The question… the question he had been refusing to sit with directly, was what was holding him back. And the honest answer… the answer that his grandmother had identified from the outside with the accuracy that was her most relentless quality, was that he was afraid.
Not of Genevieve, who had given him no reason for anything resembling fear. Afraid of the thing that happened when you opened yourself to someone entirely and they turned out to be other than you had believed. Afraid of the specific and particular shape of that feeling, which he still recognized in himself on certain mornings with a clarity he resented.
He had believed himself to be in love with Clarissa. He had believed it completely, had built something on it that he had thought was solid, had been wrong in a way that was not only painful but embarrassing, which was in some ways worse than the pain.
He had not, he understood now, known Clarissa the way he had believed he knew her. He had known the version of herself she had chosen to present, and he had not looked carefully enough beyond it, and the cost of that failure of attention had been considerable.
The difficulty was that he knew Genevieve. He knew her in the small, accumulated, unperformable way that came from proximity and genuine attention. He knew how she took her tea and which ledgers she found satisfying and what her face did when she found something funny and was attempting to be polite about it.
He knew that she hummed the same four bars of something when she was absorbed in a task, and that she lost track of doors when she was carrying too many things, and that she spoke about people she loved with a generosity that was entirely unself-conscious and all the more affecting for it.
He knew that her composure was real and not constructed, and that her warmth was not performance, and that when she said something she meant it with the full and simple sincerity of someone who had not yet learned to mean things only partway.
He knew her. That was the difference, and it was the thing that made the fear both less rational and considerably harder to argue himself out of. With Clarissa, he had been wrong about who he was looking at. With Genevieve, he did not think he was wrong. Which meant that what he felt was not the result of being deceived or of looking without seeing. It was the result of seeing clearly.
And that was considerably more frightening than anything else.
He picked up his quill and looked at the correspondence and put the quill down again.
He thought about the carriage home from the ball. He thought about her face in the lamplight and the way she had said a genuinely lovely evening with such simple and unguarded honesty that it had hit him somewhere undefended. He thought about standing at the door watching her go inside and the feeling that had arrived then, clear and inconvenient and not remotely ambiguous.
He did not think that was residue.
He sat with that for a moment. The study was quiet around him, the fire settled, the light through the window moving slightly as clouds passed. He was aware of the house in the way he was sometimes aware of it, its size and its age and the long continuity of it, his grandfather's oaks growing on the eastern edge, planted for someone who did not exist yet.
He thought about what Genevieve had said. He planted them for you, even though he did not know it was you yet.
He picked up his quill again.
He was not going to do anything foolish. He was not going to make declarations he was not ready to make or reach for things before the ground was solid enough to reach from. He was too careful for that, and perhaps, he allowed himself to think, too careful had been precisely the problem.
His grandmother was not wrong. She was irritatingly, consistently, precisely not wrong, and the advice she had delivered over breakfast was the same advice he had been slowly and reluctantly arriving at on his own for the past several weeks.
Genevieve was not a houseguest. She was not a pleasant arrangement. She was his wife, and she was remarkable, and she had taken an impossible situation and made something good out of it through sheer force of warmth and character. She deserved better than a man who kept himself at a careful remove because the removal felt like safety.
He would not get this wrong. He was not certain yet precisely what getting it right looked like, but he knew what getting it wrong looked like; he had the shape of it memorized in the particular way you memorized the shapes of things you intended never to repeat, and this was not it.
He wrote three lines of the letter in front of him, and then stopped, and found himself thinking about tomorrow, and whether she would ride out again, and whether there was any particular reason he could not happen to be at the stables at the same time.
It was not much. It was a beginning, which was what beginnings were. Not much, and then more, and then something you could not imagine having been without.
He thought he could manage a beginning.
He went back to the letter, and this time he finished it.
Chapter 14
The morning had started as their mornings usually did. Thomas had arrived at the stables with no particular stated intention of company to find Genevieve already there, in conversation with the bay mare. She was speaking in the confiding tone she used with animals and small children and, occasionally, the more approachable members of his staff.
She had looked up when he appeared and smiled at him with the uncomplicated pleasure of someone who was simply glad. He had felt it land in his chest the way it always landed those days, warm and slightly inconvenient, and had said something about the weather being good for a ride and gone to saddle his horse.
This was, he was aware, a pattern. He was also aware that he had no particular intention of disrupting it, because the alternative was acknowledging what the pattern meant, and he was not quite ready to do that before breakfast.
They rode out through the eastern gate in the comfortable near-silence that had become their natural register on those mornings. The kind of quiet that did not ask anything of either of them and was therefore the most honest thing between them, which was saying something given that a great deal between them had become honest recently in ways he had not anticipated and could not quite account for.