“The alternative is going back to the lives we were living before. Yours of survival and solitude. Mine of scandal and avoidance. Neither of us deserves that. Neither of us should settle for it.”
She thought about the entrance hall that morning, about the three children in their nightgowns refusing to let her leave. They had fought for her and they had used every tool she had given them, every lesson she had taught them, to keep her from walking out the door.
They had taught her something, in that moment, something about what it meant to be worth fighting for.
“I want this,” she said, and the admission felt like stepping off a cliff.
“I want the life you’re describing, the family, the future. I want all of it.”
“Then we’ll build it together.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“Nothing worth having is easy.”
“The children will drive us mad.”
“They already drive us mad. We might as well be driven mad together.”
She laughed despite herself, the sound escaping before she could stop it. It was the same laugh she had given him weeks ago, the one he had called beautiful, the one that had cost her so much to release.
But it was easier now. Everything was easier now, standing here with her hand in his, with the future opening up before them like a door that had finally swung open.
“We should tell the children in the morning,” she said. “Properly. With whatever ceremony Anna deems appropriate.”
“Anna will want to organise the announcement. She’ll have diagrams.”
“I expect nothing less.”
“Thistle will want to know if Brutus can be part of the wedding party.”
“Brutus will almost certainly escape during the ceremony regardless of our wishes. We might as well plan for it.”
“And Viola?”
Mel thought about the quiet child who had been the first to discover her leaving, the one who had stood at the bottom of the stairs and refused to let her go.
“Viola will be satisfied,” she said. “She predicted this weeks ago. She’s been waiting for us to catch up.”
“She sees everything.”
“She learned it from you.”
“She learned it from both of us.” Rhys lifted his other hand, brushing a strand of hair back from her face with a gentleness that made her breath catch.
“We are singularly well-matched in this undertaking.”
“Indeed we are, against all reasonable expectation.”
“Reasonable expectations are overrated.”
“Says the man who spent fifteen years being unreasonable.”
“And look where it got me.” He gestured around the study, at the fire and the books and the life they were building.
“Everything I never knew I wanted was right here before me, with you.”
Mel looked at him, at the man who had been London’s most notorious rake and was learning, slowly and imperfectly, to be something else. She thought about all the conversations they had shared in this room, all the truths they had exchanged, all the walls they had dismantled together.
