Page 81 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

She left like she did everything, completely and without ceremony. Lucy stayed sitting in the window for a long time, with the cold soup and the warm light, her mother’s measuring tape on the sill next to her, doing the only math that frightened her.

She’d heard about the Oath Capital meeting five days ago. Devney had called at nine thirty that Monday and relayed all of it, the leave of absence, the audit, the fund, Knox standing at the head of a conference table at seven in the morning saying I don’t answer to shareholders, and Lucy had listened to every word. She’d been waiting five days to wonder what she’d do when she saw him again.

She was still sitting there at five, when she heard the door and Knox stood in the frame, wearing a gray suit and no tie. His face held something she hadn’t seen on it before. He’d come here without the version of himself that ran things.

He’d found the address. She hadn’t given it to him.

“Mrs. Hadley,” she said.

“Mrs. Hadley,” he confirmed.

He stepped inside and took in the floor, the ceiling, the west windows where the late September sun came through long and low, and the lease taped in the window facing the street, and she watched him read the lease through the glass backward, because of course he did.

“Good light,” he said.

“I know.”

“I didn’t come to talk about the light.”

“I know that, too.”

He crossed the room and stopped four feet away, close enough to mean something, far enough to let her decide what came next. She’d stopped measuring his proximity a long time ago. She knew exactly what four feet felt like, and three, and two.

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a small tin, round and hinged, from a specialty shop he hadn’t grown up near but had apparently started learning his way around.

“Knox,” she said.

“Truffles,” he said. “Not my father’s recipe. I don’t have that. But I found a book, and I spent four evenings this week making them, and I need you to know that I am not a natural.”

She took the tin and opened it. The truffles were dark and rough-edged and real, rolled by hand and dusted unevenly, the work of someone who had tried and failed and tried again. She could tell by the shapes that this batch, who knew what number, was the one that made it.

She raised her eyes. His collar was crooked. She reached out without thinking and fixed it, two fingers on the left side, the seam brought back to where it was supposed to be. He went very still under her hand. She didn’t take it back right away.

“There are things I’m still angry about,” she said.

“I know.”

“Real things. Not small things. I’m not going to list them tonight, but they exist, and I’m going to need you to sit with them when I’m ready.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it. You don’t get to negotiate.”

“I’m not negotiating. I’m agreeing.”

She stepped back and put the counter’s future location between them, an invisible line of defense she’d install in marble later. “Ask me what the worst part was.”

“Tell me.”

“It wasn’t the signature.” She heard her own voice stay level and was distantly proud of it. “That was eight years ago, a stranger hurting strangers. I could have hated him forever and lost nothing.” She made herself look at him while she said it. “But it was you. The man who broke my family turned out to be the one I love, and now I don’t get to hate him cleanly. You took that from me without even realizing you had it. No fund covers it.”

He took it standing. She watched him absorb the whole of what she’d said without disputing a line of it.

“I can’t give that back,” he said finally.

“No.”

“Then I won’t insult you by trying. The fund fixes what money fixes. The audit fixes what the truth fixes. The rest of it, the part with no line item, all I can do is be a different man.” He paused. “At whatever distance you set.”