Chapter 34 #3
“You are here now,” Mary said.
“I am here now.”
“Then the weeks were not wasted. They taught you what you needed to learn.”
Evander was quiet for a moment. His hand stilled on her back. “What did they teach me?”
Mary lifted her head and looked at him. His hair was a mess. His jaw was rough with morning stubble. His eyes, usually so guarded and controlled, were soft and open and full of a warmth she had spent seven weeks hoping to find there.
“That the walls do not protect you,” she said. “They just make you lonely.”
He held her gaze. Then he kissed her, slow and sweet, a kiss that tasted of morning and the beginning of something neither of them had to fight for anymore.
“Mary.”
“Hmm?”
“The fox story. Tommy’s fox story. Do you know how it ends?”
She propped her chin on his chest. “The fox goes home. His supper is waiting.”
“My mother always added a line at the end. After the fox was home and the wood was quiet.” Evander’s fingers moved through her hair, slow and thoughtful.
“She would say, ‘And the fox was never afraid of the dark again, because he had learned that home was not the hollow oak. Home was whoever was waiting inside it.’”
Mary’s eyes stung. She pressed her face against his chest and breathed.
“I forgot that line,” Evander said. “For years. I remembered the hedgehog and the toad and the rabbits, but I forgot the ending. I forgot what the story was about.”
“What was it about?”
“Coming home to someone.” His arm tightened around her. “Knowing that someone would be there.”
Mary lifted her head and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I will be there. Every time you come home, Evander. Every single time.”
“Even when I’m difficult?”
“Especially then. Someone has to manage you. Mrs. Cahill cannot do it alone.”
Evander’s laugh rumbled through his chest. Mary smiled against his jaw, and the morning light warmed, and the room held them both, and everything that had been broken was not yet mended but was, for the first time, being tended.
Mary woke to the sound of birdsong and the unfamiliar warmth of another body beside hers.
She lay still for a moment, letting the sensation register.
Evander’s arm across her waist. His chest rising and falling against her back.
His breath, warm and even, stirs the hair at her nape.
The sheets were tangled around them both, and the morning sun fell in a wide band across the foot of the bed, and the room smelled of sleep and skin and the faint trace of lavender from her hair.
She turned, carefully, so as not to wake him.
Evander slept on his side, his face half-pressed into the pillow, his mouth slightly open, his arm still draped across her.
In sleep, the lines of his face softened.
The jaw that he kept clenched throughout every waking hour had relaxed.
The furrow between his brows, the one she had watched deepen over the weeks of crises and correspondence, was smooth.
He looked younger. He looked peaceful. He looked like a man who had, for the first time in fourteen years, stopped bracing for impact.
Mary reached out and brushed the hair from his forehead. Her fingers lingered. His eyelids flickered.
“You are staring,” he murmured without opening his eyes.
“You are worth staring at.”
One eye opened. Then the other. He looked at her, and the smile that crossed his face was unhurried, warm, and entirely without armor.
“Good morning, wife.”
“Good morning, husband.”
He pulled her closer. She went willingly, tucking herself against his chest, and they lay together in the morning light, and the house was quiet around them, and somewhere down the corridor Tommy would wake, and Mrs. Bridwell would attend to him, and Charlotte and William would be packing, and Richard would be writing to Lucrezia, and the world would resume its demands.
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.