Mary’s arms tightened across her chest. Her lips parted. She did not speak.
“I have loved you since the night you cleaned a knife wound in my kitchen at three in the morning and told me I did not have to lie to you. I have loved you since you calmed a screaming baby with nothing but the warmth of your arms. I have loved you since you walked into my parlor in a wedding dress and demanded to see a child you had never met, because that waswho you are, and I have spent every day since then building walls against a feeling that was already inside them.”
His voice shook. He let it. The control was gone, and for the first time in his life, Evander did not reach for it.
“I am imperfect, Mary. I am stubborn and guarded, and I have spent fourteen years teaching myself that love is the thing that destroys men, because I watched it destroy my father. I watched him pour himself into a bottle because the woman he loved was gone, and I decided, at seventeen, that I would never let myself be that vulnerable. And I have kept that promise every day since, and it has cost me everything that matters, and the thing it has cost me most is you.”
Mary’s grip on the gown loosened. Her arms uncrossed slowly, and the gown hung from her fingers at her side.
“I am afraid.” Evander stepped closer. “I am afraid of hurting you the way my father hurt Richard and me. I am afraid that loving you will make me weak, and that the weakness will turn into something I cannot control, and that one day you will look at me and see him.” His jaw tightened. “But I am more afraid of what I have already become without you. A man who stands in doorways. A man who sends housekeepers to ask questions he should ask himself because he is too much of a coward.”
He was close now. Close enough to see the tears drying on her cheeks and the pulse beating in her throat and the way her fingers trembled around Tommy’s gown.
“If you tell me to go, I will go. I will leave you in peace, and I will not trouble you again, and you will have this house and everything in it and the life you deserve. But if you tell me to stay, you need to know that I will make mistakes, Mary. I cannot avoid them. I am not the husband you imagined, and I will not be perfect, and there will be mornings when the walls go up again because I am still learning how to live without them.”
He reached for her hand. She let him take it. Her fingers were icy, and his were shaking, and he held them together and looked at her face and said the rest.
“But I love you. I love you, and I want to stay, and I want to build a family with you, and I want to be the man who sits beside you at breakfast and walks with you in the corridor and holds a baby in the nursery at midnight and tells fox stories in the dark. I want all of it. Every imperfect, terrifying, uncontrollable piece of it. If you will have me.”
The nursery was silent. Tommy slept in the crib. The morning light had warmed from gray to gold, and it fell across the floor between them, and Mary looked at Evander with an expression he had never seen on her face.
Not composure. Not armor. Not the polished, careful blankness she wore to protect herself from him.
Openness. Raw, unguarded, shining openness, and the tears that filled her eyes were not tears of grief.
“You…” Her voice was quiet but steady. “You offered me a child without offering me yourself. You let me walk out of your room, and you did not follow me, and I spent five days in this house loving a man who could not cross a corridor.”
“I know.”
“You hurt me, Evander. Not with cruelty. With absence. With silence. With every locked door and every sent housekeeper and every breakfast I ate alone because you could not sit across from me and be honest.”
“I know.”
“And Tommy.” Her voice broke. “You and Tommy have made me happier than I have ever been in my life. This nursery, this house, the midnight feedings, the fussy afternoons, and the bath where you held the cloth wrong. The fox story. The way you corrected Richard’s hold. The way you looked at me at the Atherton ball as though I were the only person in the room.” She gripped his hand. “You have given me everything I ever wanted and then told me I could not keep it, and that is the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to me.”
“I know.” His voice was rough. “And I am sorry. For all of it. For every day I wasted being afraid of something that was already the best part of my life.”
Mary looked at him for a long time. The gold light moved across the nursery floor. Tommy sighed in his crib, the soft exhale of a baby deep in sleep.
“Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you will try. Even when it is hard. Even when the walls want to go back up. Promise me you will stay in the room.”
“I promise.”
“It does not have to be perfect, Evander. I am not asking for perfect. I am asking for you to be present.”
“Then I am yours.” He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles. “Present. Imperfect. Yours.”
Mary’s face broke open. The composure, the armor, the careful distance she had maintained for five days dissolved, and what replaced it was the smile he had first seen in the nursery the night of the fox story.
Real. Unguarded. Full of a warmth that had nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with love.
“I love you, too, Evander,” she said.
Evander pulled her into his arms. She came willingly, fiercely, her hands gripping the back of his coat, her face pressing against his chest, and he held her the way he should have held her from the beginning, with no conditions and no reservations and no locked doors between them.
“Say it again,” she whispered against his shirt.
“I love you.”