Chapter 11:

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The new house had a room with a glass door that opened onto the garden, and we put the animals there. The gray cat found a corner behind a cabinet on her first day and did not come out for a week, which the rabbit apparently found offensive — he spent most of that week sitting in front of the cabinet, waiting. The groundskeepers gave him a wide berth.

Thane had designed the space without telling me. He had also, I later found out, asked my mother what the animals’ names were, which she had found extremely charming and told me about three times.

Callum came to visit whenever he was in Bellhaven, which was increasingly often since Petra’s family was based there. He always had news from Highcrest, delivered with the careful neutrality of a man who knows his audience has moved on but suspects the audience might still be mildly curious.

“Isolde left in the middle of a performance,” he said, on one of these visits, “to come to your engagement party, in her costume, in front of an audience. The choreographer has not forgiven her. She has had about three bookings since then, and two of those were weddings.”

I made a sympathetic sound.

“Her parents — having accepted that Thane was no longer an option — pushed her toward Cedric. Which worked, briefly, until Cedric’s parents found out you had married into the Eddington family. Apparently his mother had something to say about the fact that Isolde had ruined the family’s connection to that kind of money. She will not receive her.” He paused. “Isolde’s stepmother cut off her bank cards. Last month she asked me for a loan.”

“Did you give her one?”

“I said I would think about it.” He picked up his tea. “I have been thinking about it for six weeks.”

Cedric, meanwhile, had redirected his efforts toward our front door. Flowers twice a week, then three times. A hamper of things I had mentioned liking once, two years ago. A note that said he missed me, then another that said he missed me more specifically, then one that said he had driven past Seaglass Bay and it had made him think of me.

That last one was followed, about ten days later, by Cedric actually going to Seaglass Bay and returning with a stone he had apparently spent an afternoon finding, which he had mounted in a ring setting and had delivered to the house with a message: This is for you. One of a kind. Please be mine again, my princess.

I showed the message to Thane.

𝗗𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗣𝗗𝗙𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗮𝗹𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗺

“He went to the bay,” Thane said, reading it.

“He went to the bay.”

Thane looked at the message a moment longer. “I will talk to my parents.” He did not say it with any heat. It was the voice he used for logistical problems. Cedric stopped appearing at the door within the week.

The morning we went to the Civil Registry Office was cold and bright, the kind of morning that is beautiful in a strictly impersonal way. We were almost at the entrance when Isolde stepped out from beside a parked car.

She was dressed carefully — simply, actually, which was not her usual register. No performance in it. She looked like someone who had not been sleeping well.

“Thane,” she said. “I need you to hear something before you go in there. Roslyn still has feelings for Cedric. She has told people. You are going to be betrayed.”

Thane walked past her without breaking stride. “My lawyer has your family’s expansion application on his desk,” he said, to the middle distance. “I would stop talking.”

Isolde turned to me. Whatever composure she had assembled for the occasion came apart. “How? What do you have that I don’t? What is the secret? Tell me.” She was not shouting. That was almost worse. “He was supposed to be mine. You were supposed to be nobody.”

I had been nobody to a lot of people in Highcrest. I had learned that it is easier to be nobody and know who you are than to be somebody and spend your life performing it for other people.

I did not say this. It would not have helped.

“Cedric is right there,” I said, nodding past her. He had appeared from somewhere — he always appeared — and was walking toward us fast, hand raised, already talking. “He is free. Take care of each other.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Cedric said, arriving, slightly out of breath. “The baby is not mine. I need you to know that before any of this—”

“Think about the date,” I said. “The night you proposed to me. Work backward from there.”

He stopped walking.

Isolde made a sound I will not describe.

We went inside.

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