"She is six," Eleanor said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I wrote very neatly," Rosie said with dignity. Eleanor pressed her fingers to her forehead. The heat had arrived at her face in full and she had lost any ability to dismiss it. She wanted to say something sharp and conclusive, something that contained the situation and her and the six weeks of careful distance she had been constructing between herself and whatever this was. Instead what came out was, "Rosie, go back to the rose room."
Rosie assessed her, then him, then Eleanor again. "Are you cross?" Rosie asked. "Terribly," Eleanor said. "At him or at me?" A pause that lasted slightly too long. "Go to the rose room, Rosie." Rosie went. But she looked satisfied in the way only a six-year-old general could look after a successful campaign, tired, smudged with mud, and entirely certain she had done the right thing. The door swung shut behind her.
Eleanor stared at the Stanhopea. "I'm sorry," she said. "She is she has a great deal of feeling and very little understanding of what to do with it. She misses our mother and she has decided that the solution is to she doesn't" Eleanor stopped herself. She was rambling and she knew it. She pressed her lips together, tried again. What she said was not "Miss Calloway," he said. She stopped.
He was looking at her. The rain had returned, softer now, making the conservatory feel smaller. The orchid stood between them, pale and patient. "I didn't think the letter was misdirected," he said quietly. She looked at him. His jaw was tight in the way of someone choosing words with the same care they would choose footing on uncertain ground. "I hoped it wasn't," he said. "That is" a pause, the smallest fracture in that unhurried composure. "I'm not accustomed to hoping for things. I had retired from it."
Eleanor's chest did something she could not describe to herself in botanical terms. She looked at him, at the careful set of his shoulders and the gray of his eyes and the way he held himself like a man who had learned that stillness was safer than reaching. And she understood suddenly and completely that he was just as frightened as she was. The difference was he had said it. She hadn't yet.
She opened her mouth and the Stanhopea bloomed. Not fully, one bract only, peeling back in a slow curl to reveal the pale interior beneath, the first opening after 11 years of silence. It was small and unhurried and completely indifferent to the two people standing before it. But they both saw it. Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
"She said you were lonely," he said at last, very quietly. Eleanor looked at the orchid. "She is perceptive for her age." "Are you?" The question landed softly, no demand in it. "Just wait." She looked at him. The rain moved across the glass above them in long, slow rivulets. The conservatory smelled of green growing things and damp earth and something warmer. "Yes," she said. It was the smallest word. It cost her more than any argument she had ever made.