She had sat, listening, as he spoke, scarcely interrupting. “Is that why you haven’t asked me to forgive you?”
“I don’t see how you can.” His voice dropped low.
“No?” She looked into his eyes. “Don’t you?”
“I try not to lie to myself.”
“You walked into my life,” she said slowly. “You found evidence proving that other papers were copying my columns. You saved one of my writers from certain embarrassment and possible imprisonment. You saved me from fire. You rescued me from gaol. And, yes, you hurt me, too. But you think you would be lying to yourself if you believed I could forgive you?”
Edward shook his head. It wasn’t a denial; he wasn’t even sure what it was.
“Do you think I could hear what you just told me, and not bleed for you?” Her voice was trembling now. “Do you think I would condemn you if I heard that story, or that I would agree that you were hopeless? I have never given up hope so easily, and no matter how you hurt me, I love you too much to do it now.”
“Free.” He could scarcely speak.
“So.” She stood, brushing her hands off briskly. “You don’t think you can have forever with me. You don’t things can be lovely with the two of us. I will admit that we have some things we must discuss about our future.” She dismissed those things—their entire way of life—with a toss of her head. “But if you think that the two of us cannot resolve our differences, you are lying to yourself. Not all truths are bitter, and not all lies are sweet.”
His whole heart jolted. “Free. I don’t know—”
She came toward him. And then, to his shock, she took his hands.
“I understand,” she said. “I understand why you did what you did. I understand why you didn’t tell me. Your entire life has taught you that you can’t have anything good unless you steal it. You wanted me; you stole me. You never expected to keep me.” She shook her head. “I can even forgive you for that.”
His heart, cold and shriveled thing that it was, came to life, thumping in a way he didn’t understand. He couldn’t quite bring himself to look her in the eyes. She seemed so brilliant, so untouchable.
And yet here she was, touching him in defiance of all his expectations. This couldn’t be happening; it couldn’t be real. But her fingers were truly laced through his, warming him from the outside.
Her features softened. “You lied to me about the family that rejected you. I knew you hadn’t told me when I married you, and I married you anyway. They rejected you. I was hurt when I found out the truth. But it hurt just as much that you thought I would reject you.”
Her other hand came up and brushed against his cheek. He let out a breath.
“I still know who you are, Edward. And if you recall, I didn’t fall in love with a man who represented himself as the most honorable fellow in all of England. I fell in love with a scoundrel.”
It felt like forgiveness—sweet words that he didn’t dare believe in.
“So, yes, Edward. I think I could forgive you.” Her voice trembled. “But you can’t keep telling yourself that I am a lie, one that you must walk away from. If we’re to do this, whatever this ends up being—we’ll need to do it together.”
He almost couldn’t hear her. She had said if. She’d said she could forgive him. He didn’t know what to do with that confused, painful jumble of his emotions.
Her fingers trailed along his chin. She tilted his face up so that he met her eyes. “Come find me when you’re willing to do that.”
He’d never thought of the future until now. He’d flinched from it all these years. It had seemed as impossible to unravel as his past.
But when he shut his eyes, he didn’t think of a dark cellar. He remembered himself in the back chamber at the committee hearing just yesterday morning.
We’re that sort of friends, Patrick had insisted.
And they were. Stephen and Patrick had been the constants in his life, the two people he had never forgotten. They were fixed. They were not a lie. They’d not betrayed him, and he…
How odd. He hadn’t betrayed them either. It took him minutes to understand that, and more time beyond that, turning that bewildering thought in his head, over and over, trying to imagine what it meant.
Maybe pessimism was as much a lie as optimism.
He got out the notebook he always carried. He drew to remember—to recall all the details that his inconsistent, unreliable memory washed away. Over the months, he’d drawn a hundred sketches of Free. He started one now—one of her standing in front of her press as she’d greeted him—was that just two nights past? It was. He drew her skirts, ruffling in a breeze, her eyes, brightening in recognition.
Like every other sketch he’d made of her, this one was missing something—something so fundamental, so necessary, that he knew he’d never get anything right if he didn’t figure it out now.
He wracked his memory, searching. There she was, a lone silhouette against the doors of her business. That was wrong. Empty.
She hadn’t been alone. Slowly, he drew in the lines of his own trousers, the tilt of his head as he’d walked up to her. His outstretched hands—that brilliant smile on her face now seemed to make sense.
It had never been her that he’d drawn incorrectly.
The thing that he had been missing was…himself.
He sat sketching on that rock in the sunshine long after she’d gone back to the house. He worked until the sun switched from his left to his right side. The breeze came and went, the water rippled past.
When he was ready, he stood and went back to the house. Marshall let him in; he found Free sitting at the table.
She didn’t rise as he approached her. She didn’t frown at him, but she didn’t smile either. He wasn’t sure how he made his way toward her, if anyone else was in the room. He couldn’t see anyone but her, couldn’t think any thought except that he no longer wanted to be towering over her, looking down.
It was a simple matter to get on his knees before her, and an even simpler matter to bend his head.
“Free,” he said. “I want to make you happy, but I don’t know how.”
For a long, fraught moment, she didn’t respond. And then, ever so slowly, she reached out and took his hands in hers.
“We’ll figure it out,” she told him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
FREE DID NOT KNOW what she was doing in this house, if one could call something so vast by so unassuming a name. The ceilings reached high over her head. Her footsteps in the huge, echoing space seemed to belong to a much larger creature. A horse, perhaps, or an elephant.