She understood. He saw the calculations move behind her eyes. The village. Belmaine. The faery talk. The fragile story that let her remain beneath his roof without becoming a scandal sharp enough to cut them both.
“I know,” she said quietly.
“It is not that I?—”
“Thomas.” Her voice was steady in a way that cost her something. “I know.”
That nearly undid him more than the kiss.
She knew the difference between not wanting and not daring. She knew it and gave him the mercy of not making him say the rest aloud where the river, the mill, and Godwin’s ears might hear.
Amelia lifted one hand to tuck the escaped curl back beneath her veil. The movement was deliberate. Steadying. He watched her build her careful self-possession around herself again, piece by piece, and hated that the world had made it necessary.
“The wheel joint should hold through winter,” she said.
Thomas looked at her for one long moment.
“Aye,” he said at last. “It should.”
They walked back to the mill yard in silence, a proper distance between them.
Godwin came out to report the wheel was running smooth and the grindstone engaged. Thomas answered with all the correct words. Amelia checked the little leather-bound channel ledger and noted three things with Godwin’s quill, because even after being kissed beside a millrace she could still locate a faulty record, which Thomas found both admirable and deeply unfair.
By then the fog had finished lifting. The valley stood revealed in its late-season colors, gold stubble in the fields, copper leaves along the hedges, the river bright in patches where the weak sun touched it. Crows moved over the meadow in a ragged black line. Smoke rose from the village chimneys, thin and blue.
They started back toward Ashcombe. Amelia walked ahead of him for part of the path, her cloak dark at the hem, mud on her gown, shoulders straight. Not distant in the way she had been before.
He knew exactly what he could not have, knew, for the first time and without any remaining doubt, exactly why it mattered.
By that evening out in the stables, Thomas had brushed Cygnet twice. The mare tolerated the first brushing with the solemn dignity due to her station. She endured the second with less grace, swinging her grey head around to look at him as if he had personally insulted her intelligence.
“I know,” Thomas said.
Cygnet huffed.
“Do not start.”
She stamped one hoof.
“I am not discussing it with you.”
The horse flicked an ear, clearly unconvinced.
The stable door creaked as he paused.
“If you’re here to tell me Edith has sent for me, I’m coming.”
“No, you’re not,” Hob said. “You’re brushing the same horse until she decides to bite you.”
Cygnet gave a satisfied snort.
Thomas glared at her. “Traitor.”
Hob came to lean against the stall, broad shoulders filling the doorway, beard silvered by the last of the outside light. There was mud on one boot and straw caught at his sleeve, which meant he’d already done three useful things since supper and would pretend all of them had happened by accident.
“The mill is fixed,” Hob said.
“Aye.”