“Dominic.” Her tone was firmer, and he came out of it with a short, hard breath, eyes opening on the ceiling, chest lifting once in a rough wave and holding still. He breathed.
She did not move away. She kept her hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat, too fast, and waited while it found its way back. He turned his head and found her in the dark, and his jaw was damp along the line of it.
“You’re here,” he croaked.
“I’m here,” she said.
His hand came over hers and held it as his heartbeat slowed.
“Tell me something ordinary,” he said, his words rough at the edges.
“James has decided Newton should have a kitten to play with whenever he’s out in our garden,” she said. “He has chosen the name Admiral.”
A low sound from him, almost amused. His hand tightened around hers. “That is a terrible name for a kitten,” he said.
Annabelle hummed, her lips curving up as she watched him. “I told him so. He said the cat could grow into the title.”
He lay still, and she counted his breathing by the rise and fall of his chest, waiting.
“It was the room,” he said quietly. “In the dream.”
She waited.
“I am always the same age in it.” He exhaled. “And I always believe…this time, I’ll be fast enough.”
She moved her thumb slowly across the back of his hand. “You were but a child, Dominic,” she said. “There was nothing to be done.”
He said nothing to that, and she did not press him further about it, simply letting him process in the quiet. His breathing evened at last, and she thought he’d gone back to sleep, and then he spoke again, his tone almost childish:
“I went to the door today.”
She lifted her head to look at him.
“The east wing.” He was still looking at the ceiling. “The old music room. I stood in the corridor. I put my hand on the handle but I…”
She did not move, waiting for him to find the words for himself.
When he finally did, he said, “I couldn’t turn it. Not today.”
“But you went to the door,” she said, her tone encouraging, her heart bleeding for him, wanting more than anything to take his pain for him. Yet, he did not speak, as though he were not hearing her at all.
“Dominic.” She lifted herself and waited until he turned and looked at her. “Rome wasn’t built in a day. Remember that.”
He looked at her face in the dark for a long count. Then his arm came around her and drew her back against him, and she went and settled against his chest, and felt his heartbeat under her ear.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Newton ate the biscuit,” James said. “Charlotte’s biscuit. He came from the window seat and ate it off the rug.”
Charlotte turned her head at the sound of her name. She was standing at the low table near the window, both hands pressing flat against the wood for balance, and at some seventeen months, the standing still required a degree of concentration. She found Newton on the window seat, found the empty space on the rug, and looked at both things in turn without distress.
Newton cleaned his ear with studied composure.
“That is,” Elinor said, reaching forward to collect a scattered wooden toy from the floor, “an entirely predictable outcome of leaving a biscuit within his reach.”
James turned to Newton. “That biscuit was Charlotte’s.”
Newton moved on to his left paw.
