Aldric did his best to hide that reaction, feeling too vulnerable already. “I can’t bring myself to. I’m trying to sort out why. It is something from mymother, offered long after I had any reason to think I would have anything more from her.”
“Perhaps that’s why you’re reluctant to open it. Once you have, there won’t be anything else.” And quick as that, she’d opened a wound, exposing a part of him that could be injured far too easily.
Had he not just scolded himself for letting this attachment between them grow as much as it had? Yet he didn’t end the conversation there and then; he actually pressed forward. “Retrieving this”—he held up the parcel—“and discovering what my mother left for me is the entire reason I came to France. I am not one who can usually sit comfortably when I haven’t finished something I set out to do.”
“It is too dark in here for me to see you very clearly, but I am absolutely certain you are not at all ‘sitting comfortably.’”
“I should just open it.” But he couldn’t even inch his fingers toward the knot holding it closed. “We have far bigger things to be dealing with at the moment, dangerous and threatening things. This is neither and yet ...” The sentence dangled unfinished because he didn’t quite know how to complete it. He was not generally a nonsensical person, but he couldn’t seem to help himself in this.
Céleste sat up on the bed, moving slowly and carefully, no doubt in an effort not to wake Adèle. “For the past two years, every goal I had, everything I attempted to do, was focused on surviving the misery Jean-François inflicted on me. I had no aim other than to endure long enough to escape Paris and his house in whatever way I could.” She slid off the bed. “I have, in essence, managed that now. And, I will admit, I don’t quite know what to do with myself.” She moved slowly toward the fireplace, then sat on the floor beside him. “We have much more pressing matters at the moment than what my next chapter in life will look like, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still weighing on me.”
“You’re saying that another part of my reluctance might be that, once I open this package, I have in every conceivable way finished what was motivating me, and I will no longer have the distraction I’ve been depending on in order to avoid the thought of severing this final connection with my mother?”
“We are both a little at sea, and those waters are currently being whipped into a frenzy by a hurricane of problems caused by my extremely frustrating brother. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t still attempting to navigate future troubles alongside the current ones.” She squinted as her gaze wanderedtoward the fire, then she shifted her gaze to him. “Troubles don’t come neatly lined up, one at a time. They overlap in complicated ways. Finding all the answers isn’t meant to happen in an instant.”
Stanley had been generous in the grace he offered them all, having full faith that they would sort everything out or manage to find life’s elusive answers. Aldric had depended on that for so long. What Céleste was offering him in that moment was something different, something he hadn’t even realized he needed so much.
“I can’t remember the last time someone gave me permission not to know what I was doing,” he whispered.
“When was the last time you gaveyourselfpermission?”
He shook his head. “You have a most disconcerting ability to strike right at the heart of matters I am working very hard to ignore.”
Céleste set her hand on his where it rested on his mother’s parcel. “You—”
Shouting outside the room cut off whatever she was about to say.
The public room was just down the corridor from where they were staying, which had to be where the angry voices were coming from. It wasn’t necessarily an indication of danger specific to them. Yet Aldric knew Céleste was pondering that possibility every bit as much as he was.
He stood and moved to the doorway and slowly, so as not to make any noise, slid open the bolt. Then he inched the door the slightest bit ajar. He leaned in close to the tiny opening, listening and holding his breath.
“I’ve a job to see to,” someone barked. “Don’t think I won’t go through you to get it done.”
“I’m telling you truthfully.” That was the innkeeper. He had a gravelly quality to his voice that made him easily identifiable. “I know everyone who is here just now, and no one matches your description.”
Aldric opened the door a teeny bit more, trying to catch a glimpse of the public room. It would be a helpful thing to know what this suspicious shouter looked like. He sounded as though he came from even lower a class than Aldric and Céleste were affecting to be.
“I know they’re here,” the angry man barked out. “I know they are.”
“And I’m telling you, we haven’t got any of the privileged classes here. They wouldn’t stop at this inn for anything.”
“They’re deceiving you, and you are letting yourself be fooled.”
There was no mistaking it, no excusing it away. This angry arrival was exactly what Aldric feared.
He closed the door again and slid the bolt back into place. By the time he turned toward Céleste, she was standing and carefully feeling her way back toward the bed. “We have to get out of here,” she said.
Aldric nodded. “If we go back through the public room to the inn door, we will be spotted. But I don’t know any other way out of the inn.”
Céleste lifted Adèle off the bed and rested the girl’s head against her shoulder, and then she snatched up one of blankets and wrapped it around the girl. “See if the window will open.”
Aldric crossed to it. He turned the latch, then pushed firmly with his shoulder. It opened outward.
Nothing had been unpacked after their arrival at the inn, Céleste and Adèle having fallen asleep almost immediately. Aldric set their portmanteaus and Céleste’s violin directly beside the window.
“It’s very dark,” Céleste said.
“A bit of good fortune,” he said. “We are far less likely to be seen.”
