"My mother had storm-blue eyes," he said. "There is a portrait in the gallery. I find the library considerably easier than the gallery." He said it quietly as if he was setting something down that he had been carrying for a long time and wanted to set it somewhere clean and safe. She died when I was 14.
I was at school. They sent a letter. A pause. "I had been practicing being very correct. It seemed afterward like the most useful skill I had."
"She looked like someone who knew how to laugh," Felicity said. "In the portrait, she was trying not to." Something crossed his face. "She thought seriousness was a choice, and had better be chosen consciously, or it would happen to you anyway and be far less elegant." He paused.
"I chose it less consciously than I would like."
"Ambrose," she said. He went still again when she said his name. She was beginning to understand that his name in her voice was something he had not heard in a long time in the particular register she used: simply his name, without title, deference, or careful management. Simply Ambrose.
"I am not asking you to be different," she said. "I am asking you to be the version of yourself who stands at a pond at eight in October because he might have missed someone. That version exists. I have seen him every morning for nearly two weeks." He took one step toward her. It was not a large step.