Page 85 of Atone, Adonis

She lifted the bowl to her lips and sipped. It was delicious. Warm and slightly salty and…made with love. She knew it had been. She could taste it.

“Fred—”

“Here,” he said, slicing into the roasted beef and holding the fork out to her. “Try this.”

“Are you trying to woo me with food?” she asked but leaned forward and let him slide the fork into her mouth anyway. The beef was rich and well-seasoned, and she closed her eyes for a moment before she swallowed it down.

“That depends,” he said, after she’d eaten that bite and the next he fed her. “Is it working?”

She nodded, the remnants of her hurt vanishing under the onslaught of care. Because that’s what it had been, hadn’t it? His secrecy and lying and vows to himself of celibacy. Not care in the way she wanted or even needed, but in the best way he’d known how.

As she watched him now, she thought he was learning better ways to show his care every day. As was she.

“Fred,” she said. “I owe you an apology.”

His handsome face jerked up at that. “Why is that?”

“For the way we treated you. Thomas and I both, but I won’t speak for him. This is about us. I know you came here to Torquay because I asked you to. And I know that I shouldn’t have pushed you into having conversations you weren’t ready for.”

“You shouldn’t have had to push. I should have told you. I should have told you everything.”

“I’m not certain you could have, Fred. That’s when Chester comes out, right? When there are conversations and feelings you aren’t ready to have? He’s your armor so you wear him when you need him. And I—I won’t ask you not to if that’s what you need to do.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and gathered her thoughts, imagining each thread of forgiveness emerging just like a burgeoning vegetable shoot making its way through the dark soil of Farrow Cottage’s gardens.

“I’ve spent the last days at Farrow Cottage just…thinking. About grief and anger and all the ways it has warped us. We’ll never be who we were before the accident, our hearts unsullied by the deeds of others. We can’t go back there, to that time when Thomas was healthy and my parents were alive and you lived right across the way, coming over every night for dinner.

“And I think I blamed you for taking that unblemished version of the past away from me. But you hadn’t. It was illness that did that. That’s still doing it. Along with fate and bad luck and lightning storms and unscrupulous arseholes that we trusted when we shouldn’t. But Fred”—here she lifted her head to gaze into his intense blue eyes—“We shouldn’t want to go back there. We should treasure who we are here and now.”

“Should we?”

“Yes.” She felt the tears slipping down her face. “Because this life is beautiful too. Or it can be, if we let it. If we choose to embrace what we have instead of longing for what we don’t.”

“You can’t…Jules, you shouldn’t just forgive me. I lied to you. And I kept secrets even after you asked me to stop—because I was afraid of telling you the truth. So I pretended like my secrets wouldn’t affect you when of course they did. And then I became angry when you very rightly acted hurt.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “Yes. That’s all true. But I can forgive you if I’d like to. And I can be sorry for pushing you to speak before you were ready. I always seem to be doing that.”

“You wouldn’t have to if I were honest with you.”

“None of us is perfect. And I do understand your reasoning.” She rose and went to him, cupping his face in her hands so she could let her finger trace that small, white scar. The one that she could only see when she was this close to him. “Fred, you can’t tell me not to care for you in the same way you care for others. Has anyone ever? Have you ever let them?”

He stilled beneath her touch. And for a moment he looked as if he might turn his eyes from her, get up perhaps and make his way alone into his room beyond that closed door. But he didn’t. He closed his eyes and tipped his face into her hand, letting her soothe him.

“No,” he said.

She nodded, trailing her finger across his skin. “And if I told you that you deserve that care, that love, and so much more, what would you say?”

He made some kind of gurgling noise, so she continued on steadily. “What if I even said that my sole condition for this marriage is that you let me love you, could you accept that?”

Her thumb brushed lightly along his cheekbone and then traced the cupid’s bow of his lips. No man should have lips like his, or tousled curls that glinted gold in the evening light. Or a heart as big and wide as the Thames. But he did, her Fred.

“That is not—” he began, but the protest died on his lips when she pressed her thumb there, harder. And then he said, “It cannot be a condition of the marriage we have now. But it could…Jules, it could be a condition of another one.”

He slipped down to the floor and knelt before her. She found herself caressing the back of his stubborn, knuckle-headed skull with her hands. The longer she touched him the more relief welled up inside her.

The last days of solitude had been important to her, and so rare in a life spent as a care-giver and lately, as a wife. That time had given her space to think and to feel and they’d given her an opportunity to miss him. And she had, desperately.

Her Fred, with all his many layers. His impossibly beautiful face and the sneer he wore as armor. His careful wit and tender heart. A man who was, against all odds and certainly against reputation, one of the humblest men she knew. A man who could hem a dress and was not afraid to kneel to do it. A man who admitted when he was wrong. Who gave and gave, until there was nothing left of him but that armor—and even that, she saw now, he was finally willing to set aside.