She did not think Thomas would… she was not suggesting that he would…
She pressed her lips together and looked out the window.
She did not know why she was nervous. That was the honest answer. She could not name the specific fear with enough precision to argue herself out of it, and the inability to name it was itself unsettling. Genevieve was generally quite good at knowing what she felt and why, and this feeling was refusing to be known in that way.
She picked up her pen. She looked at the letter.
The thing about Thomas, she had written, before the crossing-out had begun, is that I believe he is trying.
She looked at that sentence for a long moment.
She believed it still. She believed it with the steady, warm conviction that was simply how she believed things she had arrived at through genuine attention and genuine care rather than through hope alone. She believed it because she knew him, and knowing him was not the same as hoping, it was something considerably more solid than that.
But she was also, she understood, sitting in the morning room—with the cold tea and the crossed-out sentences and the news that had arrived with Samuel's careful, kind voice—afraid.
Not of Thomas, not of what he would do, not of anything she could point to with confidence. Simply afraid, in the small and human way of someone who wants something very much and has just been reminded that wanting something very much is not the same as having it secured.
She set the pen down. She straightened the letter against the table, a small, purposeless gesture, and then she straightened it again.
She thought about the stream. She thought about his hand at her cheek and the quality of the silence after, and the climbing roses, and the way he had said yes with something in his voice that was not about roses at all. She thought about every morning at the stables and every evening by the fire, and every small, accumulated thing that had shifted the distance between them from something managed into something chosen.
She was going to hold onto those things. Not desperately, nor with the white-knuckled grip of someone who was frightened, but with the quiet, deliberate steadiness of someone who had decided that what they had built was real and worth protecting, and who was not going to allow an uninvited morning to undo the work of all those careful months.
Clarissa being back changed things. She did not yet know what things, or how, or to what degree.
But she knew Thomas. She knew him in the way that mattered, in the small and real and unperformable way, and she was going to hold onto that too.
She picked up the pen. She drew a line through the remaining draft of the letter and turned to a fresh page.
Caroline,
Come as soon as you can. There is rather a lot to tell you, and I find I need someone to tell it to.
Mrs. Genevieve Harrington
She folded it, sealed it, and rang for it to be sent, and then sat for a moment in the quiet morning room with her hands in her lap and her heart doing something complicated and her face, for once, doing nothing in particular at all.
Outside, the day had committed to itself. The light was full, the frost gone from the grass, the grounds bright and ordinary and entirely unaware that anything had changed.
She took a breath. She straightened her spine. She reached for the teapot, found it cold, and rang for a fresh one.
There was, she decided, absolutely no value in falling apart before the tea party.
Even as she told herself that, she could not help but wonder how Thomas would react. Would he want to see Clarissa again? Would those moments in the garden be diminished?
She hoped not.
And right then, hope was all she had.
Chapter 17
The morning had been unremarkable, which was precisely what Thomas had wanted from it.
He had ridden into town with no particular urgency. Accounts to settle with the tailor, a letter to collect, a brief and ultimately inconclusive conversation with his solicitor about a boundary matter that had been slowly failing to resolve itself for the better part of a season. The kind of errands that kept a man occupied without requiring much of him. He had been grateful for that.
He had found lately that his thoughts required a certain management, that if he gave them too much open ground, they tended to wander, though not always in the directions he expected.
That morning, Genevieve had said something at breakfast, something small and dry about the state of the east garden wall, and he had laughed before he had meant to, and she had looked at him with that brief, pleased surprise she had when she did not expect to land something, and he had thought about it twice more before he had reached town and had not entirely noticed that he was doing it.