Chapter Twenty-Nine
Damon
The weeks following the verdict brought a kind of quiet Damon hadn't experienced since childhood — not the careful, guarded stillness he'd built his adult life around, but something closer to peace, the specific ease of a man finally free of a threat that had shaped every decision he'd made for nine years.
Ashcombe's east wing reconstruction began in early spring, architectural plans spread across the estate's dining table most evenings, Marcus contributing memories of the original design that Damon, younger when the wing had last existed in its old form, had half-forgotten.
"Mother's reading room should stay exactly as it was," Marcus said one evening, studying the blueprints. "Everything else can be new. That room stays hers."
"Agreed," Damon said, and found himself, for the first time in nine years, looking forward to a construction project rather than dreading the reminder it represented.
Elena had begun splitting her time between Ashcombe and her small Manhattan apartment, though the balance had shifted steadily toward the estate over the preceding months, and Damon had started, quietly, deliberately, looking at rings.
He hadn't told anyone yet — not Marcus, not Anya, certainly not Elena — but he'd spent an afternoon three weeks earlier in a private jeweler's office in Manhattan, describing exactly what he wanted: nothing ostentatious, nothing that announced wealth the way so much of his life did by default.
Something quiet. Something that would sit on Elena's hand the way she sat in his life — unshowy, essential, entirely without pretense.
"You've been distracted," Elena observed one evening, finding him staring at his phone with an expression she couldn't quite read.
"Work," Damon said, which was, technically, not entirely a lie, though it wasn't remotely the truth either.
"Damon Castellan, lying to me." Elena raised an eyebrow, settling into the armchair across from him with the particular amused patience she'd perfected over the last several months. "That's new."
"It's not lying," Damon said. "It's — timing."
"Timing for what?"
"You'll know," he said, "when it's time."
Elena studied him a long moment, something knowing dawning slowly in her expression, and didn't push further, though the small, private smile she wore for the rest of the evening told Damon she suspected exactly what he was building toward, even if she was gracious enough not to say so.