He looked at Dioynes, who was sitting on the bank near his boot, a spot Dioynes had adopted as a regular position over the course of nine mornings, and which the Duke had stopped pretending not to notice. "I thought," the Duke said, "you might have gone." "I told Constance I was walking." "I meant—" He stopped. He looked at the pond and then at her and she watched the sequence she had watched four times now. The warming, the awareness, the decision point.
She had learned to read it very precisely. She knew exactly where the retreat would begin. It did not begin. "I leave Saturday," she said gently, not to prompt him. Just to say it plainly, because plain things sometimes let the other things pass.
"Yes," he said. "Ambrose," she said, his name in the October air between them. She had not said it before, not once, across all these mornings, and she felt him go very still when she said it, as if she had touched something that did not expect to be touched. He looked at her. "I want to say something," she said, "and I would like you to let me say it without retreating, if you can manage it, and if you cannot, that is all right, but I would like to try." He was very still.
Not the performed stillness of managed distance, but the stillness of a man holding himself carefully, because the alternative was losing the careful hold entirely. "Say it," he said. She took a breath of October air which tasted of cold and frost coming and the clear certainty that precedes winter and she said, "I think you decided at some point to be the coldest version of yourself because the coldest version is the safest version, and you have been so very good at it for so long that you have nearly forgotten that you decided. I think every time something warm happens—on the terrace, in the library, here at the pond—you notice it, and then you put it away because you made a decision, and you are a man who keeps his decisions."
She paused. "I think the decision was a reasonable one when you made it. I think it cost you something real and you were protecting what was left, but I do not think the cost has to be permanent." The morning settled around the sentence. The willows moved.
Dioynes, with the excellent timing of a duck, who had been managing this situation for two weeks, got out of the pond and sat beside the Duke's boot. The Duke looked at the duck. He looked at her, and she saw it. Not the retreat, not the managed face, but the actual face beneath it, which had been there all along in small glimpses, and which was now fully present, looking at her from across two feet of October morning, with the expression of a man who has been found accurately by someone who wasn't hunting him, and who is not sure whether this is the best or most terrifying thing that has happened to him in six years. Both, she thought, both at once.