Chapter 17
Five years after the engagement reception, I stood in the same ballroom beneath the same chandeliers.
No memorial.
No engagement.
No crisis.
A winter dinner for family and staff.
Celandine sat at the table instead of serving it.
She now managed the Hawthorne archives.
Still twenty-eight and somehow more willing to argue with me than ever.
Sebastian attended.
Dominic too.
Nathaniel complained about the wine.
Normal.
The old upholstered bench remained near the dining area.
I noticed because Clara’s little daughter had climbed onto it with a cookie.
Her mother told her to get down.
She ignored her.
Healthy family dysfunction.
Then Celandine approached carrying a small box.
“What?”
“Archive question.”
I groaned.
“During dinner?”
“You’re trapped.”
Fair.
Inside were the pearl flowers removed temporarily during the gown’s second restoration.
Not the whole dress.
Clara had decided to keep the gown for her daughter.
The conservator replaced two damaged pearls and returned the originals.
“What should we do with them?”
Years earlier, I would have wanted a velvet case.
Rosamund’s pearls.
Sacred.
Then Isabetta would have hated the shrine.
Maybe I would have defended it.
Old pattern.
I picked up one flower.
Tiny.
Cream-colored.
A little chipped where Isabetta’s shoe had pressed the silk.
I smiled.
“Ask Clara.”
Celandine nodded.
Good answer.
Not mine.
Across the room, Dominic was telling a group of younger men the story of how he once begged Sebastian Vale not to kill him.
He exaggerated now.
Apparently honesty eventually develops its own vanity.
Sebastian shouted corrections from another table.
Everyone laughed.
The story that once threatened Dominic’s entire identity had become something he owned enough to joke about.
I looked toward the upstairs gallery.
The blue room door stood open.
It had become an ordinary guest room again.
No actress.
No camera.
No forged letters.
No woman trying to become a dead wife.
No fiancée trying to defeat one.
Five years earlier, Celandine asked me who she had helped into Rosamund’s gown.
At the time I thought the dangerous question was identity.
Who was she?
Why did she look like my wife?
What was Isabetta planning?
I understand it differently now.
The dangerous question was why everyone believed a person had to replace someone else at all.
Isabetta believed becoming my wife required Rosamund becoming smaller.
I believed remembering Rosamund required keeping her unchanged.
Dominic believed accepting mercy made him less of a man.
Sebastian believed secrecy could protect everyone.
I believed love and memory were harmless simply because they came from grief.
We were all wrong in different ways.
Celandine returned.
“Clara says give the pearls to her daughter when she’s older.”
“Good.”
“She also says you are not allowed to turn them into cufflinks.”
I stared.
“I never suggested that.”
“She knows you.”
Unfortunate.
Across the ballroom, laughter rose.
I looked around.
No one impersonating anyone.
No one guarding a locked room.
No dead woman being used as weapon.
Just people carrying history badly, then slightly better.
That was enough.
I lifted my glass.
Not to Rosamund.
Not to Isabetta.
Not to the past.
To the room as it was now.
Open.
May you like
Imperfect.
Alive.
