Chapter Twelve
Townes
He watched his wife emerge from the corridor.
She crossed the room toward him with the green silk moving around her and her face carrying an expression he had not seen in years—not triumph exactly, but the particular illumination of a woman who has done exactly what she came to do.
He felt something so sudden and large it almost knocked him sideways, love, but specifically this love, for this woman, who had been hurt by his silence and by someone else's malice and who had responded by building a case and walking into that room and doing what needed doing.
He had always known she was extraordinary. He had spent two years in a silence so complete he had stopped reaching for her, and she had been there the entire time, being extraordinary, waiting for him to remember it.
She reached him and looked up and he did something he had not done in a social setting in longer than he could remember, he cupped her face in both his hands, right there in the gallery, in front of anyone who cared to look, and he looked at her.
"Win," he groaned.
"Done," she preened. But her eyes were bright.
He kissed her forehead. She let him. Then she turned in the circle of his hands to face the room and he moved to stand beside her—shoulder to shoulder, actually touching—and he watched people notice, and he was glad they noticed, because what he wanted was for the world to see exactly what he was standing next to.
Danaka appeared at Winona's left elbow and raised her wine glass an inch. Winona clinked it without looking. A small, private ceremony.
They stayed another forty minutes—long enough to be seen to have stayed, not long enough to pretend the evening was purely social—and then they said their goodbyes and walked out into the cold November air together.
On the sidewalk, Winona exhaled a long, visible breath into the night, and Townes watched the tension leave her shoulders in real time.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
She considered this with the seriousness she brought to honest questions. "I will be," she commented. "Are you?"
"I will be," he added.
She turned to look at him. The streetlight caught the green of her dress, and she was so beautiful, and he had been so far from her, and the distance had not been inevitable—it had been a choice, made in increments, by both of them.
"Let's go home," she dictated.