All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Regret Clause;One Year Together. One Love : Chapter 291 - Chapter 297

February, Thirty-Third YearIn February of the thirty-third year, Ernest counted the journal entries.Not a formal count. He did not number the entries as Don numbered his. Ernest's journaling practice had always been different from Don's — more narrative, more reflective, less concerned with the precise enumeration of days. Where Don recorded the date and the weather and the specific quality of the morning's light, Ernest wrote toward something he could not always name, circling it in prose, approaching it through description rather than direct statement.But in February of the thirty-third year, he counted in the sense of looking at the full extent.He sat in the study. The fire was low — February in England required a fire, but not the roaring fire of December and January. The February fire was the fire that knew winter was not finished but had passed its peak. The quality of February light came through the study window: not the sharp clarity of autumn, not the diffuse grey of deep

Spring, Thirty-Fifth YearIn the spring of the thirty-fifth year, Caroline came to stay for a week.She came in May — the season of the foxgloves and the grove in blossom and the thirty-fifth year of the arrangement and the fourteenth year of Ruth's tenure and the thirty-fifth spring of everything that had been planted or built in the first year. May in England was a particular kind of promise: the frosts finally over, the days lengthening, the garden exploding into growth after the hesitation of March and the preparation of April. The foxgloves were at their peak in May — the tall spires of flowers in their various shades of purple and pink and white, the bees working them steadily, the specific quality of the foxglove in full bloom that Thomas had called "the plant at its most confident."Caroline arrived on a Friday. Don collected her from the station — still, after thirty-five years, the invariable form. The station at Elmsworth, the same platform, the same walk to the car, the sa

July, Thirty-Fifth YearOn a Saturday morning in July of the thirty-fifth year, Ernest and Don walked to the quince grove.The walk was the walk they had been making since the twenty-eighth year — the summer habit, the July walk to the inside of the grove. The walk was now its own established thing: the seven years of the July grove walk, the walk with six previous July grove walks in it, the walk that had become as much a part of the summer as the foxgloves or the sound of the mower or the specific quality of the light in the late afternoon.They left the house at nine. The July morning was already warm — the kind of warmth that in England carries the memory of cooler places, the air holding the heat differently than in more southern climates, more gently, more tentatively. The sky was clear, a high pale blue that seemed to go on forever. The birds were singing in the particular relaxed way of mid-summer, when the urgency of nesting and mating was past and the business of feeding and

Epilogue Eighteen months after the withdrawal of the dissolution petition, on a Wednesday morning in March, Ernest Calloway stood at the kitchen garden gate with a cup of coffee and watched his husband argue with a quince tree. Not argue in the metaphorical sense. Don was standing at the north boundary in his coat with both hands in his pockets, looking at the smaller of the two quince trees with the specific expression he reserved for things that were not doing what he thought they should be doing — the expression that was not anger, precisely, but a very precise and focused form of disapproval. Thomas, who had come on his Monday two days before, had apparently told Don something about the tree's secondary branching that Don had not yet reconciled himself to. Ernest did not know the details. He had been in the study during Thomas's visit, managing the quarterly accounts, and had heard Don and Thomas at the north boundary for a full forty minutes and had learned enough about the con