Chapter 22 22

Chapter 22 22
Chapter 22
Daphne's POV

He was in the garden when I came down the next morning.

Not doing anything in particular — standing near the rose wall with his hands behind his back, looking at the three main canes in the early light the way you look at something when looking is the whole point of being there. I stopped in the doorway for a moment before he heard me. He was still in the way he was always still, but there was something different about it this morning, something less guarded in the set of his shoulders, as though the garden had a different jurisdiction over him than the rest of the house did and he was, incrementally and without quite deciding to, allowing it.

Then he turned and saw me and the shoulders shifted slightly. Not closing exactly. Just becoming aware of themselves again.

"I didn't know you'd be here," he said.

"I come every morning," I said.

"I know," he said. Which meant he had come knowing that, and had come anyway, and we both understood this without either of us saying so.

I moved past him to the storage room for the gloves and shears. I had more work on the lateral canes today — decisions about which ones to keep, which to remove, the slow work of determining what the rose was going to be asked to do and clearing away everything that wasn't in service of that. He stayed near the wall while I worked. Not helping, not interfering, just present in the way he had been in the library two nights ago — occupying the same space without crowding it.

After a while I said, "You can ask what you came to ask."

A pause.

"What makes you think I came to ask something," he said.

"You've been here twenty minutes and you haven't said anything about the rose," I said. "Yesterday you asked three questions about the canes in the first five minutes."

Something shifted in his expression. The faint adjustment that I was learning to read as the version of a smile he allowed himself in unguarded moments.

"Dr. Henning would like to do a follow-up," he said. "Next week. He wants to check the cortisol levels again. See if there's been any change since you arrived."

I set the shears down on the low wall and looked at him.

"And you came to the garden at seven in the morning to tell me that," I said.

"I wanted to tell you myself," he said. "Before Mrs. Dorothy did."

I held his gaze. "Why."

He looked at the rose. "Because the first time was clinical," he said. "The results, the implications. I didn't want this to feel the same way." A pause. "It isn't the same thing."

"What is it then," I said.

He was quiet for a moment. Not the evasive quiet, the thinking quiet.

"It's me wanting to know if you're alright," he said. "Without the medical framing."

The directness of it caught me somewhere undefended. I had been ready for the clinical version, had my composure arranged around receiving information and responding to it practically. I was not arranged for this. For a man standing in a cold garden in the early morning saying I want to know if you are alright in the plainest possible voice, as though it were a simple thing, as though people had always wanted to know that about me.

I turned back to the rose.

"The cortisol levels don't change quickly," I said. My voice was even. I was making it even. "Dr. Henning will tell you that. It takes time and consistency."

"I know what he'll tell me," he said. "I'm asking you."

The space between us felt different than it had a moment ago. Closer without either of us having moved. The garden was very quiet and the morning light was doing the thing it had done yesterday, coming in at an angle across the south wall, and I was aware of him behind me with a specificity that had nothing to do with threat and everything to do with something I did not have clean language for.

I turned to face him.

He was closer than I had calculated. Not inappropriately, not with intent — he had simply moved at some point while I was looking at the rose and the distance between us was now something I could feel as a physical quality of the air.

"I'm better," I said. "Than I was. I don't know by how much."

"Better than you were," he repeated. As though weighing it.

"It's more than I expected to be able to say," I said. "In this amount of time. In any house."

Something moved through his face at that. Quick and unguarded and gone before I could fully read it, but not before I had seen the edge of it — something that looked like it hurt, which was not what I had expected from him, not directed at something I had said about myself.

"Daphne," he said.

Just my name. Nothing attached to it. But the way he said it was different from the way he had said it before — less careful, less managed, with something in it that hadn't been permitted through before. I felt it move through me the way the cold did, everywhere at once.

"I need to tell you something," I said. The words came out before I had decided on them. Before I had decided it was time.

He waited.

The garden held its breath around us, or I held mine, which amounted to the same thing.

"The reason I know this house," I said carefully. "The reason I knew I could survive it. It isn't only because I've survived other houses." I stopped. "There's something I should have told you earlier. I kept waiting for the right time and I think I've been using the waiting as an excuse not to say it."

He was very still.

"Tell me," he said.

The morning light lay across the stones between us. The three rose canes stood stripped and patient against the repaired wall. I looked at him across the small cold distance of the garden and understood that the window I had been waiting for had been open for longer than I had admitted to myself, and that what I had actually been waiting for was to feel, in some part of myself that I trusted, that he would not use the truth against me.

I trusted it now.

"The Moon Goddess showed me your mark," I said. "Before I ever saw it. In a vision, in the cell, the first night I was here." I held his gaze steadily. "I know what it means. I've known since the second day."

He said nothing.

"You're my mate," I said. "And I should have told you sooner."