For a moment, she could not answer. Then she looked toward the writing table. The notebook lay open where she had left it, the ink still drying upon the last page.
“I have already ended it,” she told him.
Andrew went very still. The little color that remained in his face faded.
“I see.”
“No,” Frances said softly, smiling. “I don’t think you do.”
She shifted the baby carefully to one arm and reached for the notebook. Andrew moved at once as though to assist her, then stopped himself. The small restraint nearly undid her more than a touch would have done.
Frances lifted the notebook and placed it in his hands. “Read it.”
He looked at her, uncertain.
“Please,” she urged.
At that, he opened the book. Frances watched his eyes lower to the page. For one foolish instant, she wished she had written with more care, chosen better sentences, made the ending more elegant. Then his voice began, low and roughened by emotion.
“Miss Eleanor looked upon the house she had once believed a prison and saw with a tenderness that frightened her, that it had become a home. It wasn’t because its walls had changed, nor because sorrow had never crossed its threshold, but because somewhere within it, without meaning to, she had left pieces of her heart. She did not know whether love could mend all that silence had broken. She did not know whether trust,once wounded, could be made whole again simply because one wished it to. But she knew this: that the gentleman beside her had become dearer to her than safety, dearer than pride, dearer even than the certainty she had once demanded before she would allow herself to hope.
“She had been afraid to love him, afraid that loving him would make her foolish, that forgiving him would make her weak, that reaching for him would only prove how much power he still held over her heart. Yet, there he stood, not perfect and not absolved by a single word, but present. And perhaps that was where happiness began, not in forgetting the hurt, nor pretending that it had never happened, but in choosing, with trembling hands and an honest heart, to remain.
“So, Eleanor took his hand. Outside, morning broke over the garden. And because she had never cared for endings that punished people for learning too late, she allowed herself to say what fear had kept hidden for far too long.
“She loved him. She loved him in a manner that wasn’t safe or uncomplicated, but she loved himtruly. And at last, that truth was written plainly enough that even he could not mistake it.”
Andrew stopped reading. The silence that followed was fragile and full. When he looked up, his eyes were bright.
Frances tried to smile, but it trembled. “I wrote it because I thought that, if I could not have a happy ending in my own life, I might at least manage one on paper.”
He did not move. “Frances.”
“But I begin to think,” she continued, with her voice unsteady now, “that perhaps I was less imaginative than I supposed.”
His hand tightened around the notebook. She stepped closer. The baby slept between them, warm and innocent and utterly unaware of all she had mended simply by existing.
“I was hurt,” Frances admitted. “I am still hurt.”
“I know.”
“And I am angry.”
“You have every right to be.”
“And if you ever again decide that noble silence is preferable to trusting me, I shall make you regret it with a thoroughness that will astonish even you.”
A faint laugh broke from him, almost a breath, almost pain. “I believe you.”
“You should.”
“I do.”
She looked at him then, truly looked, and saw not the duke, not the man who had once offered marriage as arrangement and distance as protection, but Andrew: tired, frightened and hopeful despite himself.
“I love you,” she finally said the words she had been longing to tell him.
His expression changed. No composure could have survived it.
