She took to her new responsibilities with the same quiet diligence she'd once applied to mending clothes she'd never be permitted to wear, learning the running of a great estate not because it was expected of her, but because she found, to her own surprise, that she enjoyed it: the careful balancing of accounts, the small decisions that shaped the lives of dozens of people who depended on the household's steady management, the particular satisfaction of seeing a well-run home function smoothly around her.
Rhys, for his part, made a point of including her in matters that many men in his position would have kept entirely to themselves: correspondence with his solicitors, decisions regarding the estate's tenant farms, even the occasional political matter that arrived by letter from London.
"You have a clearer sense of fairness than half the men I've consulted on these questions," he told her one evening as they sat together in his study, reviewing a dispute between two tenant families over a shared boundary line. "I'd be a fool not to make use of it."
"I've never been asked my opinion on anything of consequence before," Avalene admitted. "It's strange, being trusted this way."
"You'll grow accustomed to it," Rhys said. "Though I hope the novelty never entirely fades. I'd hate for you to stop being surprised by your own worth. I intend to keep reminding you of it regardless."
Winter arrived early that year, blanketing the estate in a hush of snow that Avalene found she loved more than she'd expected, having spent so many previous winters confined to cold, drafty rooms with little comfort beyond her own determination to simply endure until spring. Here, the cold felt different: softened by warm fires in every hearth, by Rhys's habit of seeking her out in whatever corner of the house she'd settled into with a book, by the particular joy of watching snow fall over gardens that were, however strange it still sometimes felt to acknowledge, now genuinely her own.
She visited her father's grave that winter for the first time in years—the small country churchyard where an empty memorial stone stood in place of a body the sea had never returned. Rhys accompanied her, standing a respectful distance away while she knelt in the snow and spoke quietly to a man who had never known how the story would eventually unfold, who had died believing, perhaps, that he was leaving his daughter to a household that would care for her the way he no longer could.
"I wish you could have seen this," she told the stone, her breath clouding in the cold air. "I wish you could have seen him."
When she rose, Rhys was there beside her. He said nothing, only took her hand and held it as they walked back to the carriage together. And Avalene understood in that quiet moment that grief and joy were not opposites, but companions, capable of occupying the same heart at once without either one diminishing the other.
Spring returned the gardens to bloom, and with it came the first tentative signs that the family she'd married into would soon expand further still.