"I have been telling myself for a long time that what I felt for Clarissa was love. I treated it as the defining experience of my emotional life. I was very attached to it. To the version of events in which I had loved her and lost her and that was the significant thing, the real thing, and everything afterward was somehow less."
He said it with the expression of a man who is not enjoying what he is saying and intends to say it anyway. "I was wrong. I know that with a certainty I do not think I can adequately explain, except to say that I know it because I have something to compare it to."
The fire shifted. She waited.
"I fell in love with you," he said. "I do not know exactly when, which I realize is not the most romantic thing I could say, but I think it was gradual and I was not paying the right kind of attention until it was already complete. I think it was the arguments, actually. The way you argued. You never argued to win; you argued because you were actually interested in getting to the right answer, and it was so unlike almost everyone I had ever spoken to that I did not know what to do with it at first."
He stopped. "And then the garden. The way you talked about the garden when you forgot to be careful with me." He looked at her directly. "I love you, Genevieve. Not as a consolation for something else. Not as the reasonable alternative to a more dramatic feeling. I love you specifically, because of who you specifically are, and I have been an extraordinary fool about it."
She looked at him. She had prepared for several versions of this conversation. She had prepared for explanations and pleas and the reasonable case for returning and the argument that what she had seen was not what it appeared. She had not prepared for such a declaration. For the unmediated plainness and courage of it. The way he dismantled every piece of his own preferred narrative and set it out in front of her without arrangement or defense.
Her eyes were doing something inconvenient. She addressed it by looking at the fire for a moment.
"You are an extraordinary fool," she said.
"Yes."
"You have managed this very badly from the beginning."
"I know."
"You should have told me about Clarissa from the first. I would have—I do not know what I would have done, but it would have been better than weeks of not knowing."
"I know that too." He leaned forward slightly. "I am going to spend the rest of my life making sure you know that I understand how badly I managed it. And making sure you know—" He stopped. "You told me on the stairs that you were in love with me. I have thought about that sentence every hour since you said it. I need to know—"
"Thomas."
"I need to know, Genevieve… whether it is still—"
"Thomas." She reached out and put her hand over his and felt him go still. "I love you. I have been in love with you for a very long time and it has been extremely inconvenient." She looked at him. "You hurt me."
"I know."
"I need you to not do it again."
"I will not." He turned his hand over and held hers, and his voice, when he spoke, was quieter. "I know that's easy to say. But I intend to spend a very long time making it true." He looked at her with that same unguarded steadiness. "Come home."
She looked at him for a long moment. The fire was warm and his hand was warm and she thought about the drawing room at home and the garden he wanted to build and the Fielding that was staying exactly where it was on its shelf, and something in her chest that had been rigid and careful for weeks simply let go.
"All right then," she said. "Let’s go home.”
There was a moment of pause, as if he could not believe it. Then he stood. He crossed the distance between their chairs.
“Thank you,” he said as he cupped her cheeks in his hands. Then he kissed her. Her eyes widened, but then she closed them and leaned into his warmth. She kissed him back, and it was several minutes before either of them said anything further.
When she finally drew back, he was looking at her with an expression she had not seen on him before, open and slightly undone and entirely, completely hers, and she thought that she would spend a considerable amount of time getting used to it.
She found she was very willing to do that.
"I need to say something else," he said. His voice was quiet, and he was still holding her face in his hands, which made it harder to be composed about, so she did not try to be. "I have spent a considerable amount of time in the last five days understanding things I should have understood months ago, and I intend to spend the rest of our marriage making sure you know that I see them now.
That I am paying attention. That I am not going to be someone who requires losing a thing to understand its value." He looked at her. "You told me on the stairs that you had fallen in love with me. I should have told you—I should have been telling you, for months—that the feeling was mutual. That it has been mutual for a long time, and that I knew it and was afraid of it, and that the fear was mine and not yours to carry." He paused. "I am sorry that you carried it."
She looked at him. The fire was warm and the room was quiet and outside, distantly, she could hear her father's voice somewhere in the house doing something domestic and entirely ordinary, and she thought: there it is. There he is.
"You were very difficult to be in love with," she said.
"I know."