"You are staring."
"It is distracting."
"The boys are noticing."
The boys were in fact giggling. Georgiana ignored them.
"There is a letter from your father," she said. "He wishes to visit at Christmas. He asks if he may bring his new wife."
Sebastian set down the chalk. His expression was carefully neutral, but she saw the hope beneath it—the same hope she had seen in the library nearly a year ago when he had first asked her to consider his proposal.
"My father has not set foot in this house in 3 years," he said.
"He wishes to meet his grandchild."
"He does not know if it is a boy or a girl."
"He does not care."
Georgiana walked into the classroom and stood beside him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. "He has written to me every month since the wedding."
"He asks about you."
"He asks about the girls."
"He asks about the school."
"He is trying, Sebastian."
"He is not good at it."
"Pero he is trying."
Sebastian looked at the letter in her hand. Then he looked at the boys who had abandoned all pretense of working and were watching the drama unfold with rapt attention.
"Tell him he may come," he said quietly. "Tell him... tell him I would like that."
Georgiana smiled. She folded the letter and tucked it into her pocket. And she did not tell him that his father had already purchased a rocking horse for the nursery. Some surprises, she decided, were worth saving.
The morning bell rang. The boys scattered to their next lessons. Sebastian caught Georgiana's hand and held it for a moment, his thumb tracing circles on her palm.
"You saved me," he said.
"I did not save you. I simply refused to let you drown."
"That is the same thing."
"No." She squeezed his fingers. "Saving implies that you were helpless. You were never helpless. You were lost. There is a difference."
Sebastian looked at her—his practical wife, his unexpected partner, the woman who had seen him at his worst and stayed anyway. He thought about the debts he had paid, the horses he had sold, the promises he had kept. He thought about the school, built with money he had earned through sacrifice and honesty. He thought about his sisters laughing in the garden, about the child growing in his wife's belly, about his father coming home for Christmas. He thought about the man he had been and the man he had become and the distance between them.
"I love you," he said.
It was the first time he had said it, the first time either of them had said it, though the words had been waiting in the air between them for months. "I love you, Georgiana. I did not marry you for love. I did not even like you at first. But I love you now, more than I have ever loved anything."
Georgiana's eyes filled with tears—those stubborn tears she had been holding back for a year. She did not wipe them away.
"I love you, too," she said, "though I wish you had told me about Thorne before the wedding."
He laughed, pulling her close. "That is the most practical declaration of love I have ever heard."
"I told you I am a practical woman."
She leaned her head against his shoulder, and they stood together in the bright schoolroom surrounded by the noise and chaos of children learning, and neither of them felt the need to say anything more.
Some arrangements, they had discovered, became something more. Some bargains turned into blessings. And two practical people who had never expected to find happiness had found it anyway—not in grand gestures or passionate declarations, but in the quiet, stubborn work of building a life together day by day, choice by choice.