"You have asked me about my mother, who I have not spoken of to another living soul in fifteen years. You have asked me why I still keep her rose garden, when every sensible person would have told me to plow it under and plant something more fashionable. You asked because you wanted to know the answer, not because you were calculating what the answer was worth to you."
"And what is the answer?" Margaret asked softly. "About the rose garden?"
"She planted it the year before she died," Sebastian said. "And I could not bear to lose the last thing her hands had touched. I have never told anyone that. I have let them believe I simply have an eccentric fondness for roses."
He studied her for a long moment.
"You are the only person who has ever thought to ask what was underneath the eccentricity, Margaret. Do you understand what that is worth to a man who has spent a decade being loved for a title he did not earn and cannot escape?"
Margaret did understand. She understood it with the whole of her body, a recognition that ran far deeper than the careful, practical logic she had built her life on. She had spent twenty years being told her worth had an expiration date, that a woman's value diminished with every year that passed unmarried, until she was left at forty holding nothing but the scraps of a life society had already written off.
And here was a man who looked at her and saw, apparently, the opposite: not a woman who had run out of time, but a woman who had spent that time building something true.
"I am forty years old, Sebastian," Margaret said, testing his given name in her own mouth for the first time. "I will not grow younger for you. I will not give you the easy, uncomplicated courtship a girl of twenty could offer. I have opinions I will not soften, and a hospital I will not abandon, and gray in my hair that I have absolutely no intention of hiding beneath powder for the rest of my life."
"Good," Sebastian said without hesitation. "I have had a decade of easy and uncomplicated offered to me on a silver tray, Margaret, and I found every single one of those offers unbearably tedious. I do not want a girl who would agree with everything I say. I want a woman who will tell me when I am wrong, and manage a hospital better than most men manage an entire estate, and sit across from me at breakfast for the next forty years arguing about Latin grammar. I have found exactly one woman in the whole of London capable of any of that, and I am not fool enough to let society's opinion of her age talk me out of her."
He reached across the small distance between them and took her hand, his thumb tracing gently over her knuckles, over the small calluses she had earned from two decades of holding pens and ledgers, and occasionally the trembling hands of patients too frightened to be alone.
"Marry me," Sebastian said.