"Ellie," Rosie said. Eleanor looked at her sister. Rosie had abandoned the beetle. She was watching Eleanor with eyes too steady for six. With a particular expression of a child who has been paying attention to adults for long enough to understand things they never meant to show her. "Are you scared?" Rosie asked.
Eleanor considered lying. It would have been the easy answer, the composed answer, the answer that required nothing further. "Yes," she said instead. Rosie nodded slowly. As though this was acceptable. Expected even. "I'm scared of lots of things," Rosie said. "I'm scared Mrs. Partridge will leave and scared that you'll go somewhere far away and scared that I won't remember Mama's voice properly in a few more years." She said these things the way she said most things. Plainly, without self-pity. Each one placed down carefully like stones. "But I think being scared of something good is different from being scared of something bad."
Eleanor looked at her sister for a long moment. Six years old. Muddy pinafore. Watching a beetle on a Sunday morning. The truest person she knew. "When did you become wise?" Eleanor said softly. "I've always been wise," Rosie said. "You've just been busy."
She sent him a note that afternoon. She wrote it four times. The first three versions were too long, full of qualifications and careful sentences that explained themselves before they could be misunderstood, the written equivalent of keeping your coat on indoors. The fourth version was six words. "I am willing." Tomorrow, the gardens. She sent it before she could write a fifth.
He was there before her. She had half expected this. He was, she had learned, a man who arrived early to things and stood quietly until they began. She found him near the fernery, which was either coincidence or something more deliberate, and she suspected the latter. He turned when she heard her footsteps on the gravel path. The morning was clear and cool. The gardens washed with a particular pale light of late summer beginning its slow turn toward autumn. Around them, the trees were still fully green, but there was something in the air, a suggestion barely there of change coming.
They stood a few feet apart. He looked at her the way he had looked at the orchid in Lady Pemwick's conservatory, with genuine attention without performance. "Miss Calloway," he said. "You came to my house," she said. "I did." "You left a card." "I did." Pause. "I nearly didn't write on the back. I stood at your door for some time arguing with myself about it."
Something moved in her chest, warm and slightly undone. "What won the argument?" "The part of me that has been attending botanical lectures for 2 years and sitting at the back," he said, "and finding that the one variable that makes them considerably more worthwhile is whether you are also present." Eleanor looked at him. The morning held them both in its pale light. Somewhere in the gardens a fountain made its steady sound.