*Why?*
Ryan turned the question over with genuine puzzlement—and then stopped, because more than one or two reasons presented themselves immediately. They had argued today about the flower arrangements. About the replacement tree. About the placement of the seating near the garden wall. None of it had been serious—they would exchange a look of mutual reproach and then, five minutes later, arrive at a solution that was usually somewhere between their two positions—but he had a habit of pressing just past the point where a reasonable man would let things rest, because Eloise frowning at him was, for reasons he'd stopped trying to examine, something he found entirely worth provoking.
She had clearly documented her feelings on the matter.
The portrait beside his name was a circle with sharp eyes and a lopsided, self-satisfied grin that he recognized immediately and with some discomfort. She had captured something true about him in half a dozen lines, which he thought was genuinely impressive.
He remembered the other drawing—the one he'd found in the first weeks at Blissbury, the one that had made him question his own eyes. Ryan Wilgrave rendered in careful, tender strokes, every feature given attention, the whole thing suffused with the particular quality of someone drawing a face they had thought about for a long time.
And then: this. A circle with a smug mouth.
He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
It was practice paper—she'd fill out the real place cards cleanly. He wasn't taking anything she'd miss. He looked over the other names on the sheet: elegant long-tailed script, careful embellishments, the kind of work that in the capital you hired someone specifically to produce. And one name so elaborate it was nearly a sentence—*Rospigliosi Benedetta Scrimgeour-Wedderburn*—navigated without apparent difficulty.
Only Ryan Thornton's name had been written as though by a child holding the pen for the first time.
On purpose. Definitely on purpose.
He found a blank sheet, picked up the pen, and wrote four lines. Then he set the note on the table, looked at Eloise one final time, and made himself turn to go.
Her hair had come loose while she slept, falling forward across her face.
He reached out—not a decision, just a reflex—and caught himself with his fingers a breath away from her cheek.
He stood there for a moment.
Then he stepped back, exhaled slowly, and left. He pulled the door closed behind him, gently, so that no one passing in the corridor would look in.
---
The night wind found the window latch and the frame creaked, and Eloise surfaced from sleep.
The lamp had burned low—a thin, wavering flame that was nearly finished. She registered this distantly. She needed to find a candle before it went out entirely.
She understood this. Her body had not yet agreed to participate.
She was warm, which surprised her. She had a vague memory of meaning to bring a blanket, but no clear memory of actually doing so. She must have managed it in her sleep. She pulled it closer and turned her face into it and was about to drift again when—
She stopped.
She knew this scent. Deep forest after rain. Woodsmoke and moss and something underneath that was inexplicably like sunlight. She had noticed it before, in passing, when he stood close enough—
The moment she placed it her eyes came fully open.
She looked around the room with sharp attention. The dying lamp. The table, her papers. The door, which she had left open and which was now closed.
No Ryan.
She let out a breath.
It was not, she realized with a lurch of dismay, a breath of relief.
She was on her feet before the thought had finished forming.
*What is wrong with me.*
She pressed both hands briefly to her face, which had gone warm, and went to find a candle before the lamp failed entirely.
Something fell.
She looked down.
A coat. A man's coat, too large to be anything she owned, lying at her feet where it had slid from her lap when she stood.
She picked it up.
She already knew whose it was before she checked—the scent confirmed it immediately, which did nothing to help with the warmth in her face. She stood holding it and looked at the closed door and thought about what it meant that he had come in, covered her, and gone out again without waking her.
*Ryan is not that sort of person.*
She knew this with a completeness that surprised her, if she thought about it. They argued constantly. He was maddening and self-assured and had an unerring instinct for exactly which position would irritate her most. But she had never, not once, felt anything from him that she would call threatening. He would knock too loudly and make some remark about finding her asleep at her desk rather than actually working—that was what he would do, if he were being unkind.
He had closed the door so no one passing would see her.
She touched her lips briefly, out of an abundance of caution. No evidence of anything embarrassing. Good.
She hung his coat over the back of the chair and sat down at the table—and saw the note on the white paper in handwriting she recognized.
*I read your frank impressions of me.*
*— Ryan, whom you hate —*
Eloise stared at it.
Then she dropped her face into her hands, and sat there for a moment in the candlelight, and said nothing at all.