Page 149 of A Curse of Hope and Shadows: Part I
And she would be alone again.
You are too young to have found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.
That being said, her parents weren’t much older than she was when they wed. Neither had lived to see forty. People married young in Ferdinard, with little in the way of career prospects or further education available for the common folk. What else were they to do?
What do you want, Adeline?
Companionship. Freedom. Joy. Purpose. Love.
So much more than this world could offer her.
So much more than any one person could.
The door to the library creaked open. Adeline saw a dark, familiar shape lurking in the shadows. Her heart thumped at his proximity, but her words could not come.
“I thought you might have gone for the night,” he said softly.
“I will soon,” she replied, avoiding his eyes as she shimmied down the ladder, taking care not to fall, wishing that she would. “I just want to stack these, first.”
Dimitri nodded, searching through the volumes, soundlessly moving the ladder to the next section for her.
She wanted to ask if he’d come to see her.
Shedidn’twant to ask if he’d come to see her.
Silently, they worked through the books. Silently, they packed away. When the trolley was cleared, Dimitri turned to face her, and for a moment she thought that he might speak.
“Good night, Adeline,” was all he said, but with the finality of separation, as if he did not believe they would be speaking to each other again for a long, long time.
She wanted to call him back. Instead, it was all she could do to keep the tears inside her.
It was fully dark by the time she made it home, but no one was in bed yet. Adeline smiled and greeted her family with hugs and kisses, and Edie crawled immediately into her lap. She gave her a bath, took her up to the bedroom, gave her a nice long cuddle and story and breathed in her soapy hair.
“You are wonderful and lovely,” she told her, as the child dozed off in her arms. She stroked her nose, kissed her forehead, brushed her tiny curls. “And enough,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “You’re enough for me.”
She let her sleep against her until her arms went numb, and then crept downstairs to repeat the process with the boys. They exhausted her so thoroughly that she was quite ready to march back to the Manor that night, only Elliott greeted her with a glass of lukewarm wine when she finally returned to the hearth.
“Leonie not joining us?”
“She’s in the study. Reading.”
“Well, what else would she be doing?”
A simple chuckle passed between them, and they slid into their seats, the ones once belonging to their mother and father.
Whatever else she had failed at, whatever weaknesses were inside her, she was almost certain they would be proud of them.
“We do an all right job, don’t we?” she whispered across the embers.
Elliott, not needing to ask what she meant, nodded. He stared into the fire with her. “I wish… I wish you would tell me what’s happening with you.”
Adeline froze. “I don’t want you to worry.”
“But Iamworried, Adie! You don’t magically save me from that by keeping it to yourself—”
“Mother did.”
Elliott fell back in his seat. “You mean that she never showed her grief in front of us when we were grieving for Papa?”
