Chapter Sixteen
Friday, just after sunrise, a fresh glow painted the horizon with hope.
Mary-Ann had risen early, the house still and dim, and paced from room to room like a ghost uncertain of its purpose.
The parlor, the study, even the morning room.
Everything was too quiet, too contained.
She’d picked up the shawl from the hook by the door without thought and stepped outside.
The wind had picked up by the time Mary-Ann reached the edge of the green.
She hadn’t meant to walk so far. She hadn’t meant to leave the house at all.
But the walls had begun to feel too close, and the air inside too still.
The trees here bent gently in the breeze, their leaves whispering above her like voices she almost remembered.
She didn’t plan a direction. Her feet simply knew the path.
Past the green, along the winding walk lined with sea grass and stone, until the cliffs emerged just beyond the hedgerow.
From there, the whole of the North Sea stretched wide and blue gray under a sky still deciding whether it meant to clear.
The breeze off the water met her like an old friend. It was cool, honest, and bracing.
Her mind wandered, unspooling thoughts she’d spent months trying to suppress, her feelings, as she tried to make peace with losing him.
She told herself a hundred times that he was gone, that grief would settle like dust if she only waited long enough.
And yet when she saw him again, standing whole and alive, it hadn’t felt like resurrection.
It had felt like the truth returning. The lie had been every day without him.
And now he was here. Breathing the same salt wind. Watching her. And she didn’t know whether to run from him or collapse into the space between them.
She stood alone on the path, her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders, staring out over the low stone wall toward where the sea would be.
Professor Tresham once said the sea made better listeners than people.
She hadn’t understood what he meant until now.
She had seen it earlier, wide and endless, but from here, it was hidden behind the slope and trees.
Still, she could feel it in the wind, in the hush between leaves. It was never far. Not really.
She turned to head back and nearly collided with him.
Quinton.
He stopped just short, hands raised instinctively. “Forgive me. I didn’t see—”
“No,” she said quickly. “It’s all right. I wasn’t watching.”
They stood there, not quite close enough to touch. Not quite ready to move away.
The wind stirred again, brushing hair across her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear with fingers that felt clumsy.
“You walk early,” she said.
“Sometimes.”
He looked as he had the night of the charity dinner.
Sharply dressed, with a hint of tiredness around the eyes.
But now he wasn’t surrounded by noise and candlelight.
Now he was just a man standing in the morning, watching her as if she were the only thing in the world not blurred by wind and distance.
“I went to the docks,” he said.
She nodded. “And?”
“There’s something wrong. The more I ask, the less anyone seems willing to say.”
She met his eyes then. “I believe you.”
He didn’t expect that, not so easily, not so openly.
A dozen half-formed arguments caught in his throat, all of them rendered useless by the certainty in her gaze.
He studied her face, looking for doubt, for hesitation, but there was none.
Only weariness, and something that looked a little too much like hope.
“You always did see things clearly,” he said. “Even when no one else wanted to look.”
She exhaled, slowly and quietly. “It’s harder now. Everything feels murky. But I remember how things used to be, how my uncle handled the manifests. How certain ships arrived with more cargo than they had when they left. I think something started changing even before you left.”
It should have been a relief. It wasn’t. Not quite. The silence between them filled again, not with tension, but with something heavier. Familiar.
“Mary-Ann…”
He took one step closer. She didn’t move.
“I never stopped—”
“Don’t,” she said softly. “Please.”
His breath caught. Not at her words, but the way she said them. It hurt to ask him to stop, like it would hurt more if he didn’t.
He reached for her hand. Slowly. He gave her time to pull away. She didn’t. Their breath mingled in the space between them, suspended, neither of them willing to be the first to break it.
He searched her face not for permission but for recognition.
And what he saw there stopped him. She didn’t flinch or look away.
She held his gaze like a mooring line as if she were anchoring herself to this one moment.
There were no more questions in her eyes.
Just a quiet challenge and something softer beneath it. Recognition.
Their fingers met, tentative at first. Then sure.
For the smallest moment, she remembered a spring morning two years ago when he’d tried to teach her a sailor’s knot.
She had failed miserably and blamed the breeze for his poor technique.
Later, still laughing as they stepped inside, she knocked over an inkwell on the writing desk and ruined her dress.
He’d offered to replace it but instead brought her a tin of lemon drops.
“Far more practical,” he’d said, deadpan as if it were a matter of naval policy.
The memory struck her now, sudden and unguarded, and she laughed, just once, under her breath.
He smiled in response, and the tension shifted into something warmer.
Braver. His thumb brushed the edge of her glove, and that was all it took.
He leaned in. She did too.
Their lips met in the space between restraint and longing, shattering every careful silence they’d built. The kiss wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t rehearsed. It was raw and aching and full of all the years they’d spent trying to forget how this felt.
She pressed closer, her hand finding his coat lapel. He gathered her in, as if he couldn’t help it, as if he’d spent three years with this absence carved into his chest.
When they pulled apart, neither of them spoke.
Mary-Ann’s heart was thudding so hard she could feel it in her fingertips.
Her lips still tingled, not only from the kiss, but from the truth of it.
The unspoken ache, the certainty that neither time nor distance had dulled whatever invisible thread still held them fast.
Her breath trembled against his collar.
He touched her cheek with the back of his hand, reverently. It wasn’t a goodbye, not quite. But it wasn’t a promise either. Just a moment that held still, fragile, and was too real to put into words.
“I’m not sorry that happened,” he said, voice low but steady. It was all he gave her, and everything she would remember.
She could have answered. Should have. But the truth was still too large, too bright to speak aloud. It pulsed behind her ribs like a secret she’d never meant to give away. He didn’t press her. He didn’t need to. Her silence told him everything louder, deeper, more honestly than words ever could.
Without a word, he took a step back.
She let him go. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Her throat was tight, her thoughts unraveled. If she opened her mouth, she wasn’t sure what might fall out. Would it be something foolish, something brave, something true?
But her eyes never left his.
Neither of them looked away.
He walked away first, slow and sure, as though putting distance between them required more effort than he’d admit. Mary-Ann stayed where she was, watching as his back receded down the path. Her hands were still folded at her waist, but her fingers trembled faintly against the fabric of her glove.
When she finally turned, the wind caught her shawl again. She didn’t fix it. Let it flutter. Let it pull. Because some part of her still stood in the moment they had shared, anchored there, breathless and undone.
She walked slowly, each step with a strange mix of lightness and ache.
The path felt different now, as though it remembered what had just happened.
The wind had gentled, or maybe she’d simply stopped noticing its bite.
Her hand drifted once to her lips, then dropped quickly, as if the memory could be disturbed by touching it too often.
She didn’t try to name what the kiss meant. Not yet. But it lived in her now in the racing of her pulse, in the quiet sense that something had shifted. Not broken. Not healed. Just changed.
She passed the corner where Mrs. Haversham always placed her flowerpots, still damp from the morning watering.
A cat lounged on a windowsill across the street, watching her as if privy to secrets best kept silent.
A boy darted from a doorway with a kite trailing behind him, laughing as the fabric snapped in the breeze.
Nothing looked different. And yet every breath felt strange in her chest, fuller, harder to hold.
The town was waking up around her, the soft murmur of brooms against stone, the squeak of a window being opened. Life continuing. But she walked through it as though wrapped in another hour entirely. One that still echoed with his voice, his touch, his kiss.
And though the town still lay quiet ahead, the day no different than any other, she knew something had begun, something she couldn’t undo and didn’t want to. Not ever.