But not yet. For now, the morning belonged to them.
“Evander.”
“Hmm?”
“I think we have missed breakfast.”
“I will survive.”
“Mrs. Cahill will talk.”
“Mrs. Cahill has been waiting for this since the day you arrived in a wedding dress. She will be relieved.”
Mary smiled against his chest. His fingers traced the curve of her shoulder, lazy and content, and the silence between them was not the careful, measured silence of two people navigating distance. It was the silence of two people who had nowhere else to be and no reason to pretend otherwise.
“I love you,” she said. Not because it needed saying. Because she could.
Evander pressed his lips to the top of her head. “I love you. And I am staying. And I am going to say it so often that you will grow tired of hearing it.”
“Try me.”
He pulled the coverlet over them both and drew her closer, and the morning stretched, warm and golden, and Mary lay in her husband’s arms on the right side of the bed that had been empty for seven weeks, and she did not think about walls or corridors or locked doors.
She thought about the spring, and France, and the family she was building with a man who had finally learned that the bravest thing he could do was stay.
EPILOGUE
ONE MONTH LATER
“She is going to cry before the vows.” Isabella leaned toward Mary in the second pew, her whisper carrying the conspiratorial warmth of a woman who had crossed the English Channel specifically to witness this moment. “Look at her. She is already blinking.”
Mary looked. Charlotte stood at the altar of a small stone church outside Paris, sunlight pouring through the arched windows and falling across her cream silk gown in ribbons of gold.
William stood beside her, his hand gripping hers, his face flushed with the combination of terror and joy that belonged exclusively to grooms who had written four drafts of their vows and still feared they would forget every word.
Charlotte was blinking.
“She will hold,” Mary said. “Charlotte never cries in public.”
“She cried at Lady Huffington’s musicale during her first season. You told me she wept through the entire second aria. You told me.”
“That was London. This is France. The rules are different.”
Isabella squeezed Mary’s hand. Beside her, Isabella’s parents sat with their hands folded and their best traveling clothes pressed, and Isabella’s younger brother had already fallen asleep against his mother’s shoulder.
The church was small and ancient, with rough stone walls and wooden pews polished by centuries of worship. Wildflowers filled the window ledges. The scent of lavender drifted from the fields beyond the door, and the late September light turned the whole interior to amber. Charlotte had chosen this church because it was a ten-minute walk from the apartment she and William had taken near the Sorbonne, and because it had no connection to England or scandal or the life they were leaving behind.
In the front pew, Lord Langham sat with his hat on his knee and his chin trembling. Beside him, Quentin slouched with the easy posture of a man who attended weddings the way other men attended horse races for the entertainment and the refreshments. He caught Mary’s eye and winked.
Across the aisle, Richard sat beside Lucrezia. His hand rested on her knee, and she leaned into his shoulder, and the ease between them was visible even from three pews away. Lucrezia wore a deep burgundy gown that made her dark hair gleam, and shewatched the ceremony with the focused attention of a woman already imagining her own.
Evander sat beside Mary. His arm rested along the pew behind her shoulders, not quite touching, a proximity that would have been invisible to anyone watching but that Mary felt in every nerve. He had been like this since the morning they woke in the same bed for the first time. Close. Present. A man learning, day by day, how to occupy the space beside someone without retreating from it.
The rector spoke. William recited his vows. He forgot two lines, and Charlotte mouthed them to him, and the small congregation laughed, and William grinned and started again, and the love in his voice when he saidI willcarried through the stone church and out through the open door and across the lavender fields.
Charlotte spoke her vows without blinking once. Her voice was steady and clear, and she held William’s hands and looked at him as though the entire world had narrowed to his face.
Isabella leaned toward Mary and whispered, “I was wrong. She is not going to cry.”