“And I would like the reception to be no longer than two hours.”
Dorothea looked briefly as though she might argue. Then she looked at Megan’s face and evidently thought better of it. “Two hours,” she said. “We shall manage.”
* * *
Harry cameto find her the evening before the wedding.
She was sitting in the window of her room, reading, or making the motions of reading while actually looking at the street below. He knocked and came in without waiting for an answer, which she had noted was characteristic of him, and sat down on the window seat opposite her with the particular set to his jaw that meant he was preparing to say something he had been assembling for some time. She knew the look because it was her look. Her heart bloomed as she took in her brother. She loved him more than she could say.
“Well?” she said, closing the book.
“I have something to say,” he said.
“I gathered.”
He looked at her. The evening light was coming in at an angle that caught his fair hair, and she thought, not for the first time, how astonishing it still was to have a brother. To look at someone and see yourself in the angle of the jaw, the line of the brow.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I give you away.”
“You do.”
“I have had you for a few short weeks.” His voice was even. It had cost him something to make it even, she could tell. “Six weeks, Megan. I have been looking for you for many years and I have had you for six weeks and tomorrow I hand you to someone else.”
“You’re not handing me to someone else,” she said gently. “You’re setting me free to live my life with the man I love. It will never mean I don’t love you or want you in my life. But soon you’ll marry and have a family of your own too.”
“It feels very like the same thing from where I’m standing.”
She studied him. He was not a man who showed distress easily, her brother. He had her father’s dignity, her mother said, which Megan understood to mean he had learned very early to hold difficult things at a distance. But he was not holding this ata distance. He was letting her see it, which she thought probably meant more than he knew.
“Harry,” she said. “I am not going anywhere.”
“Scotland,” he said. “You are going to Scotland.”
“For a short period of time—two months at the most. And then we come back, and we are very likely to be in London for a significant portion of every year, because Oliver’s grandmother will insist on it and she is approximately twice as determined as either of us and we have both already established that arguing with her is a waste of energy.” She leaned forward. “You are not losing me. I have only just found you. I am not remotely interested in being lost again.”
He was quiet for a moment. “He’s a good man,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard her. “I didn’t want to think so, initially. But he is.”
“He is,” she agreed.
“He would walk through fire for you.”
“He more or less already did.”
“Yes.” Harry looked at his hands. “Yes, he did.” A pause. “It’s only that I keep thinking about all the things I don’t know. Years of you that I missed. Things I should have been there for. I don’t know what frightens you or what you love or what makes you laugh. I am still learning who my sister is and you are about to go and be someone’s wife.”
Megan felt the tightness of it in her chest. The particular ache of things that were irretrievably true.
“You will learn,” she said. “We have time, Harry. That’s the thing I had to learn, when I first came here. That time actually exists for us now. We are not going to lose it.”
He nodded, slowly. Not entirely convinced, but trying.
“Besides,” she said, keeping her voice light, “you are going to need me when you find the woman you want to marry.”
Harry looked up. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’ll want a second opinion. Someone who can tell you ifshe’s worth you. I intend to be extremely useful in that capacity.”
He stared at her with an expression of such pure affront that she nearly laughed.
