When they separated, just slightly, just enough, neither of them spoke immediately. She pressed her forehead briefly to his shoulder. His hand moved to her hair. The morning continued around them. The fountain ran. The trees stood in their late green. "Rosie," she said finally against the wool of his coat, "is going to be completely insufferable." She felt the sound move through his chest before she heard it. A laugh, low and real, the laugh of a man rediscovering that the sound was still available to him. "She deserves to be," he said. Eleanor laughed, too. Quietly. Into the space between them that was no longer a distance.
Three weeks later, on a Tuesday morning, a small figure in a yellow dress sat in the front parlor of the Calloway house on Marsh Street and received a visitor. The Duke of Ashworth sat across from Rosie Calloway in the chair that was slightly too large for him, holding a cup of tea he had been given with great ceremony, and asked her, formally with complete seriousness, for her blessing.
Rosie considered him. She studied his face, his hands, the way he held the cup carefully as though things given to him mattered. "Will you make her less lonely?" she asked. "I will try every day," he said. "For the rest of my life." Rosie nodded once. The nod of a general accepting a satisfactory report. "You may have her," she said. And then, because she was six, and because some things must be stated plainly, "But if you make her cry, I will put beetles in your hat."
He looked at her with those steady gray eyes. "That is entirely fair," he said. Rosie picked up her biscuit. "I know," she said.
They married in October. Not in a cathedral this time. Eleanor had been specific about this, but in the small chapel at Alton Green where the ceiling was low and the windows were plain glass and the light came through honestly without trying to be anything more than light. Rosie stood at the front in a new yellow dress with white flowers in her hair that Eleanor had pressed and dried herself. Bellis perennis, common daisies, which Rosie had chosen because she said they looked cheerful and Eleanor had not argued because she was right.
The Duke stood at the altar and watched his bride walk toward him and did not attempt to arrange his expression into anything other than what it was. Eleanor walked without trembling. She carried no roses. She had brought instead a single stem of Stanhopea from the conservatory at Aldrin, pale and extraordinary and blooming finally in her hands. When she reached him, she looked up and found his face open and unhurried and warm in the way she had cataloged across months of careful not looking and had finally allowed herself to keep.
She had been given nothing. She had chosen everything. That, she thought, feeling the cool chapel air and his steady presence and Rosie's small hand briefly squeezing hers before releasing it, was the only kind of love worth arriving at. The kind you walk toward yourself with your eyes open and your hands full of things that had finally learned to bloom.