than a few days to forget that time at her side.
Was it better to forget? Or to be changed?
“I have been thinking,” Viola said, “that I should like to move households.”
Ah. So this was the decision behind that beatific smile. “Surely not to live with Mother?”
Viola’s expression of horror was eloquent. “Indeed not. I love visiting her, but living with her would make me only a daughter again. I’ve altered too much for that.”
Jack nodded, accepting. “What have you in mind?”
“A cottage, maybe. Not like a tenant. I don’t know how to do anything useful. But a cottage of my own, where I won’t be surrounded by...so much.”
After two years, she was ready to break from the constant reminders of loss in the house she and Helena had shared. He could understand that. He could smile, even, at her assertion that she didn’t know how to do anything useful. It reminded him of Marianne—and since those reminders were all too few here, he didn’t want to escape them. Yet.
“You know how to make a home,” Jack told his sister. “Nothing could be more useful for a woman who wants her own cottage. You find a place you like, and I’ll buy it and deed it to you. Helena would like that, don’t you think?”
“She would like to see us happy. And on an evening like this, how could we not be?” Viola lifted her face to the sky, breathing in deeply.
To Jack, the air smelled clean and cool. The sky was big and open, poked gently by treetops. There were the croplands, their earth rich and smooth and well tended. The wolds, high and rolling and treed, and the fens to balance, grassy and waterlogged and teeming with buntings and crickets and butterflies. The sun began to yawn gold and pink across the deepening blue above.
It was nothing like London.
He’d gone to find the man he used to be. He’d gone to feel something, to be absolved. And he had placed all that responsibility on Marianne’s shoulders, though he swore he wanted nothing from her.
He’d always wanted something from her. He had always wanted her to love him. When he tried to make himself into the sort of man he’d always wanted to be, it was because that was the sort of man he’d grown up admiring. Just as she’d been swaddled in silks and taught to paint and sew and flirt, his examples had been men who mended fences—literally and figuratively. Men who rode and learned and were accomplished at everything from Latin to getting a muddy field to produce. And never, in all those years, had anything made him as happy as learning to cook had made Marianne.
When she went away, she’d learned who she wanted to be. Never yet had Jack sorted out so much. He’d come all the way from Lincolnshire to London hoping she’d solve his problems. Hoping she’d make it all right that he’d spent the years away from her by leaping, now, into his arms.
But neither of them was the same as they’d been eight years before, when she might have leaped—but he wouldn’t have been able to catch her. They were, deep down, the same people, but they knew better now. She wouldn’t leap unless she knew she could land on her own, and he...here he stood with his arms empty.
It was what he’d earned. The reaping of the lonely life he’d sown, where he’d become a bounty to the people around him, but neglected to feed his own heart.
“Right,” Jack agreed into the silence. “Right. I can be happy here.” What was the alternative? Never feeling joy at all?
Viola looked at him sharply. “No. I’m sorry I said that. You don’t have to be happy this evening. It’s not a requirement, and there’s no schedule you must follow.”
But that didn’t comfort. If he didn’t have a schedule, how could he know he’d ever reach his goal?
Whatever the devil it was.
“Are you coming in?” Viola asked. They had reached the front door of the Grange, the old brick manor house.
“Not yet,” Jack told his sister. “I’ll be in by dark.”
She nodded, then climbed the steps and entered the house.
It was the only home Jack had ever known, and it wasn’t nearly the home it ought to have been. Not because of any flaw in the house, which had stood and abided generations of Grahames, but because of the people who had raised him.
Had Jack’s father had any regrets? He had no more