She had hung her mother's gray dress, frayed cuffs and all, in a place of honor in her chamber. She would never wear it again, but she would never part with it either. It had carried her family's truth, stitched into its very threads, through ten years of darkness, and it had been the thing that saved her in the end.
A carriage came up the long drive a little before noon. She knew it at once, and her heart lifted before she could school it not to.
Arthur stepped down, dressed plainly as was his way, and climbed the steps to meet her. He looked tired, she thought—the weeks had been long for him, too—but there was a lightness in his face she had not seen before.
"Lady Genevieve," he said, and bowed.
"Your Grace." She smiled. "You need not bow to me. Not you, of all people."
"I find I rather like to," he said. "It is a fine thing to bow to a name that ought never to have been taken from you."
They walked together in the gardens, as they had walked together through archives and abandoned houses and the storm of that final gala, and for a time, neither spoke. The autumn air was cool and clean; somewhere, a gardener was burning leaves, and the smell of it drifted sweet across the lawns.
"I have come to tell you how matters stand," Arthur said at last. "Sterling is finished. His titles are gone, his estates forfeit, and there is not a door in the county that will open to him now. He has retired to the country in disgrace, and the law is not yet done with him. He will spend what remains of his life answering for what he did to your family."
"And to so many others, I should think," Genevieve said quietly. "A man does not steal once and stop."
"No. Others have come forward since—old wrongs, long buried." Arthur looked out over the gardens. "Your father's ledger has done a great deal more than clear one name. It has unstitched ten years of lies."