Chapter Eighteen

Isolde's POV

I did not tell him that night. I did not say anything. I stood in his hallway with my hand on the door and the photograph burning in the back of my mind, and I said, "Thank you for tonight," and he said, "Good night, Isolde," and Pell drove me to Marlowe Street in a silence so thick I could hear the clock on the dashboard.

At one in the morning I was sitting in my grandmother's kitchen with the light off, crying into a dish towel.

I had not meant to. I had come down for a glass of water and found myself at the table instead, the same table with the cracked corner, and the moment I sat down the whole week came loose and spilled out of me. The envelope. The cream note. The man in the gray coat. The look on Saffron's face on the steps of the Mirabelle Room, desperate and wrecked, a look I once would have crossed an ocean to see. I cried for all of it, and I cried because I was happy, and that was the worst part.

"There you are."

The overhead bulb clicked on. Grandma stood in the doorway in her flannel nightgown with her hair in a braid, one hand on the frame.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."

"I was not asleep. My knees do not let me." She shuffled over, filled the kettle, and set it on the stove. "Do you want to tell me, or shall I guess?"

"You'll guess."

"He told you."

I looked up. She was watching me with that dry, tender expression she had worn my whole life.

"How do you know?"

"I am old, child. Not stupid." She sat down across from me with a grunt. "That boy has been looking at you like a starving man at a bakery window since the first night he ate my stew. I was only waiting to see how long he would hold out."

"He said he loves me."

"And?"

"And I don't know what to do."

"What do you feel?"

"I feel..." I pressed the towel to my mouth and laughed, a wet, ugly laugh. "I feel like I'm betraying someone. And I don't even know who. Saffron doesn't deserve it. The baby has his blood. I thought it would feel like standing on a cliff. But it doesn't. It feels like when you finally get warm after being cold for years. And I'm so scared I'll ruin it."

The kettle began to hiss. Grandma got up, took two chipped mugs from the shelf, dropped a tea bag into each, and poured. Her hands were swollen, the knuckles like walnuts. She set one mug in front of me and sat down again, slowly.

"I will tell you about your grandfather," she said.

"Grandma, you don't have to."

"I will. Listen. When I met him I was nineteen and he was twenty four, and he had a stutter so terrible that he could not order a cup of coffee. I thought he was the dullest man alive." Her eyes were far away. "He asked me to dance at a church social. I said no. He asked again the next week. I said no again. Every Sunday for a year, that man stood across the hall and asked, and every Sunday I said no, and every Sunday he said, 'That's all right. I will ask again.'"

"What changed?"

"Nothing. That is the point." She smiled. "One Sunday I just said yes. Because I realized he was not asking to win something. He was asking because the question itself was how he loved me. And I had been waiting all that time for someone to ask like he meant it."

I stared at her tea.

"Saffron asked you to marry him, did he not?" she said gently. "He asked you with a ring. A fine ring. A fine proposal, I am told, at a restaurant with violins."

"Yes."

"And did he ask you again? Every morning? Every Sunday? In the small ways?"

I closed my eyes. Five years. I thought of the table set for two, the empty chair, the way he slid past me in the hallway like I was furniture. I had stood in that kitchen a thousand times and wished he would just look up.

"No," I said.

"Then you have your answer. Not about the boy. About yourself." She reached across and tapped the back of my hand. "You do not owe your heart to the man who broke it because he is sorry now. And you do not owe it to the man who mended it because he has been good to you. You owe it to nobody, Isolde. You give it. That is all it is."

I wept again, but differently. It wasn't the broken, helpless crying of before. It was slow and warm, like rain after a long drought.

"I think I love him," I whispered.

"I know." She squeezed my hand. "Go to bed. Tell him in the morning."

"Not in the morning."

"Then when?"

I thought of the photograph. The young woman with the tray, looking terrified. And of a man in the shadow of the frame, five years ago, who had stood in a ballroom and seen her and never forgotten.

"When it snows," I said.

It snowed on the ninth of December.

The first flakes came out of a low gray sky just before dusk, soft and unhurried, and by the time I stepped out of the tower at six the whole street was white. The traffic had slowed to a crawl. People stood on the pavement with their faces turned up like children. I stood among them with my scarf pulled over my chin and one hand on my stomach, where, I swear, something small had fluttered that morning for the first time.

Dacre had not mentioned it. He had not asked, not even with his eyes. For three weeks he had been exactly what he said he would be: a quiet man at my shoulder, waiting. He had never once pushed.

I went back inside. I took the elevator up to the top floor, past his office, to the glass door that opened onto the roof terrace. He had told me once that it was where he went to think. I pushed it open.

The wind hit me first, cold and sweet. Then the snow, drifting sideways across the rail. The whole city lay spread below, lit up in gold and white, and at the far edge of the terrace, with his back to me and his black coat dusted with flakes, stood Dacre Knight with his hands in his pockets.

He turned.

"Isolde." He started toward me, and stopped. "You should not be out in the cold."

"I wanted to see it."

"The snow?"

"No." My voice shook. "You."

For a long moment neither of us moved. The wind caught my hair. A single flake settled on his eyelash, and he blinked it away, and he looked younger than I had ever seen him.

"I saw the photograph," I said.

"I know."

"You kept it five years."

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because I did not know how to forget it." His voice was low and a little rough. "You were so frightened, and you held on anyway. I thought, I will never meet anyone braver than that. And then I did."

My eyes stung. I crossed the terrace, one step, two, until I was standing right in front of him with the snow falling between us.

"I'm still scared," I said.

"So am I."

"But I'm ready."

He stopped breathing. I saw it. His whole body went still, and his eyes searched my face as if he were afraid he had misunderstood.

"Say it again."

"I love you, Dacre."

He did not move for a second. Then he lifted both hands and cupped my face, very gently, as though I were made of glass. His thumbs wiped away the wetness on my cheeks. His forehead came to rest against mine.

"I will ask you every day," he murmured. "Every Sunday. In every way I can. For as long as you will let me."

"You already did."

He kissed me.

It was not like any kiss I had known. It was slow, and warm, and certain, and it tasted like snow and ginger tea. I curled my hands in his coat. His arms came around my back and held me close, close enough to feel the faint, steady beat of his heart through the wool, and the world narrowed to that one small circle of heat on a roof in the middle of the winter.

When we broke apart we were both breathing hard.

"Marry me," he said.

I laughed against his chest. "Ask me again next year."

"I will."

That was when I saw it. Over his shoulder, on the dark terrace of the building across the street, a small white flash. Then another. A shape crouched behind the rail, holding something up to its face.

A camera.