Page 142 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“I’m going,” I say. “And you have to let me.”
He blinks those big hazel eyes at me. He looks so young all of a sudden, almost like he did when he was sixteen. Elegant and arrogant and vulnerable all at once. “We fell in love when you were in Thorncombe too,” he reminds me. “Twice, in fact. You don’t have to be living here for us to be in love.”
“I won’t stop loving you,” I say, and it’s the truth. But I don’t say the other true thing, which is that I won’t be in Thorncombe.
If I’m going to leave, then I need to leave for real. Someplace where the temptation of Auden Guest can’t reach me ever again. What that means for me and Poe, I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out.
I hope.
“Is this goodbye then?” he whispers. “Is this our goodbye?”
I step closer, close enough to kiss his cheek, which I do. “Let’s pretend this morning was our goodbye.”
“We have to say goodbye precisely because of this morning,” he says in a surly tone, but when he turns to kiss me, his gaze is raw and sweet. I let him kiss me—soft, chaste kisses. Kisses for beginnings. Or for endings.
“This morning was inevitable,” I tell him. “We both know that. It was always going to be this way. A choice.”
“A choice,” he echoes brokenly.
“I love you,” I tell him again, because he needs to know it, because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to say it to him again. “I love you, Auden Guest.”
And then it’s my turn to walk out of the library and prepare to leave. I go upstairs to my room to pack and to think about how I’ll explain all this to Poe, and my phone rings as I walk into my bedroom. I don’t recognize the number, so I let it ring and go to voicemail while I find a bag and start throwing essentials into it. When my phone alerts me I have a new voicemail, I hit the button to listen to it.
“Hello, St. Sebastian,” says a warm, polished voice that I can’t quite place. “My daughter gave me your number, and I hope that’s quite all right, I didn’t know of any other way to contact you with some degree of privacy. And Delphine says you don’t have Facebook or WhatsApp or any of the other places where I could message you . . . ”
Delphine—ah. This must be her father, Freddie Dansey.
Strange for him to be calling me.
“I was hoping you could call me back and we could speak sometime. I debated reaching out, you know, but I think this is too important to go undiscussed.”
And then he gives his phone number and asks me again to call.
When the message ends, I’m so completely baffled by it that I don’t even delete it. But neither do I call him back—I hate the phone and I hate talking to people I barely know and combining the two is a special kind of hell.
And it’s not like I don’t have more important things to do right now. Like upend my entire life and walk away from the man I love in order to preserv
e what’s left of my soul.
“Sorry, Freddie,” I mutter and toss the phone on the bed so I can use both hands to shove clothes in my bag. “Maybe another time.”
Besides, if it’s really important, he’ll call back, I’m sure.
But what could Freddie Dansey, of all people, want to discuss with me?
Chapter Thirty-Three
Rebecca
The Long Gallery is on the upper story of the Jacobean section of the house—a pointless space, I’ve always felt, built for some long-dead Guest ancestors to show off how many paintings they owned, built for promenades and for amusing bored house guests in between their extramarital trysts and amateur theatricals.
The only good thing about the gallery is its absurd number of windows. Huge, diamond-paned things lining the wide space on both sides. It would have cost Auden’s ancestors a fortune to buy them all four hundred years ago, and it cost him a second fortune to restore them this year, but it was money well spent. They afford a view that’s like something out of a movie, something out of a magazine about period homes in the countryside. The green and ancient forest with the stark, foggy hills rising up above it, glimpses of the pretty village to the east, a teasing glint of river to the south. The Thorne Valley in all its secretive perfection.
But I’m not up here for the views right now. I’m here for the blond standing alone in a window-lined alcove.
“Delphine,” I say, my voice soft.
I’m surprised she can hear me over the rain lashing against the glass, but she does. She turns, silhouetted by the silver world behind her, and my heart flips over in my chest.
