“Very dire. He is talented at dire.”
Isabella smiled. “I am happy for you, Mary. Genuinely. After everything. You deserve this.”
Mary squeezed her friend’s hand, and Isabella squeezed back, and the afternoon stretched golden around them.
“Papa, careful with his head.”
Lord Langham held Tommy at arm’s length, his face caught between tenderness and terror. His grip was too wide, his elbows too stiff, and his expression suggested he was trying to remember a skill he had last practiced two decades ago and had not been very good at then. Tommy stared at his grandfather with suspicious interest.
“He is heavier than I expected,” Langham said.
“He is nearly four months old. They grow.” Charlotte adjusted her father’s arm, guiding the elbow up. “Tuck him into the crook. Yes. Like that.”
Langham settled Tommy against his chest. The baby’s fist found Langham’s cravat and gripped it with the iron determination Mary had come to think of as his signature. Langham looked down at his grandson, and his face changed.
The anxiety fell away. The bluster, the reputation-management, the fretful calculation that had defined every interaction Mary had witnessed between her father and the world outside his study. All of it dissolved, and what remained was a man holdinga child and understanding, perhaps for the first time, what all the managing had been for.
“I owe you both an apology,” Langham said. His voice was quiet, pitched for his daughters and no one else. Charlotte stood on one side, Mary on the other, and the garden buzzed with conversation behind them. “Not the one I gave in the parlor. That was panic, not remorse. This one I have been rehearsing for a month, and I will not get it right, but I want you to hear it.”
“We are listening, Papa,” Charlotte said.
“I failed you.” Langham’s chin trembled. “Both of you. I arranged your lives without asking what you wanted because I was too afraid to hear the answer. I managed your marriages the way I managed my accounts, and I treated your happiness as a line item that could be deferred.” He looked at Mary. “You told me, in that parlor, that I only ever cared about my reputation. You were right. And I am sorry.”
Mary looked at Charlotte. Charlotte looked at Mary. The same glance they had exchanged a thousand times growing up, the silent language of sisters who had survived a household together and knew each other’s thoughts before they formed.
“We accept your apology,” Mary said. “But we expect you to keep your word.”
“Letters,” Charlotte added. “Every week. Both directions. And visits. Twice a year, at least. Tommy deserves to know his grandfather.”
“Twice a year.” Langham pressed his lips to Tommy’s forehead. “I will be here so often they will give me my own customs stamp.”
Tommy grabbed a fistful of his grandfather’s hair and pulled. Langham yelped. Charlotte and Mary dissolved into laughter, and the sound of it, two sisters laughing at their father while their children and husbands and friends filled a French garden behind them, was the sound of a family.
A family that had come apart and chosen, piece by piece, to come back together.
“He will not remember this.”
Mary stood beside the carriage that would take Charlotte, William, and Tommy back to their apartment in Paris. The garden was quieting, the guests departing, the lanterns now lit and swaying in the warm evening breeze. Charlotte held Tommy against her shoulder, and the baby slept, his fist curled against his mother’s collar.
“He will not remember it,” Charlotte said. “But we will. And we will tell him. Every year. How his aunt held him first, and loved him first, and taught his mother how to change a cloth and warm a bottle and tuck a blanket to the waist and not an inch higher.”
Mary’s eyes burned. She reached out and touched Tommy’s cheek, soft and warm in the lantern light. His lips moved in his sleep.
“You call him the dock worker,” Charlotte said. “I have been calling him that, too. Mrs. Bridwell will be pleased.”
Mary laughed, and the laugh caught on a sob, and Charlotte pulled her into a one-armed embrace, Tommy pressed between them, and Mary held her sister and her nephew and breathed them in.
“Visit in the spring,” Charlotte whispered. “Promise me.”
“I promise. I already promised. I will keep promising until you believe me.”
“I believe you.” Charlotte pulled back and wiped Mary’s cheek with her thumb. “Take care of your husband. He needs managing.”
“Everyone keeps telling me that.”
William shook Evander’s hand. The grip was firm, and William held it a moment longer than formality required. “Your Grace. I will never be able to?—”
“You can. By taking care of them.” Evander glanced at Tommy. “Write to us. Send us drawings when he is old enough to hold a pencil. And do not let him eat the pencil.”