"Do you go to London often?" she asked after a while. It was the kind of question that could mean nothing at all.
"Less than I should," Rafferty said. "More than I want to."
"What do you want?"
He looked at her. She had asked it simply, not with the arch glance that such questions usually came accompanied by, not with any visible strategy. She was watching the garden and had asked a straightforward thing and appeared to expect a straightforward answer, which was unsettling because he was not accustomed to questions that expected the truth.
"To be left alone to run the estate," he said, which was the answer he had given for seven years, and which sounded, said aloud in this gazebo, in this rain, somewhat more like a defense than an ambition.
Adelaide nodded slowly, as though this were reasonable, as though she were filing it somewhere. "And are you," she said, "when you're left alone?"
"Am I what?"
"Left alone. I mean, is it as good as you expected it to be?"
A longer pause. The rain on the roof was steady and particular, the way rain sounds only when you are inside something small and the rest of the world is outside it. His boots on the stone floor, the smell of wet grass and roses, and the watered-down light of a gray Yorkshire afternoon.
"No," he said. It was the most accurate thing he had said in some time.
She turned and looked at him fully, and something in her face—not pity, nothing so condescending—was simply recognition: the way one person looks at another when they have found them saying something true.
"Good," she said. And then, as if correcting herself, "I mean, not good. I mean, it's easier if you know."