The fields were full of rich, verdant grasses, the trees towered into the sky, and today it was blue.
The sun was setting slowly, its yellow hues turning to purple and gold.
Stars were coming out to dot the night sky.
He felt cold and alone and broken and more like a little boy than he had in his entire life.
It was hell.
He had faced brutal men and courts that happily would have crushed half of humanity, but Beatrice telling him that she loved him had been the worst of all.
For some men, no doubt, a declaration of love from such a woman would have been the greatest moment in their life.
Not for him. For him, it had woken the feeling of his entire life being yanked out from under him.
What was he going to do?
He wanted Beatrice.
He’d come to need her. Like air in his lungs. How would he breathe without her?
He wanted her so much he did not have words for it.
She brought a peace and a purpose to his life that he’d never felt, a joy and amusement and a feeling of accomplishment. She saw him in a way that no one else did. But love?
What would happen in a few years’ time when that love caused them to act like fools, to do and say things, to have arguments that could not be bound or fixed or made better?
Was he attempting to live his mother’s past?
Legs worn, he dropped down onto the cool, long grass of a field aside the deeply grooved, empty road out of London.
Night fell, and the stars glimmered overhead. He caught sight of a bright star.
It did not flicker; it shone steadily.
He stared at it and stared until he was not certain how much time had passed, but the night breeze blew through his hair, and for a second, he felt as if all the pain and all the fear had been blown away from him, because that star reminded him of something.
It reminded him of Beatrice—steady, strong, fierce, unwavering in her fire.
He doubted Beatrice, because he had known pain and loss, but she was not the past. She was not that pain or that loss. She was a star, blazing bright in the sky, casting light all the way down from the heavens to earth, touching him, teasing him, correcting him, daring him to do better.
He drew in a shuddering breath.
Did he love Beatrice? Had he been pretending all this time that he did not, when he did?
He tried to imagine his life without her now, letting her go, and all he could see was a black void without starlight.
It was a life he did not want to live, for it would be empty and cold and without reason.
She made him stronger, and she had cast a light on the fear that he had been living his life by. All this time, he had been so certain that he was the strong one, the one who was guiding everyone else, when in fact it had been his fear of letting go that had been ruling everything.
His fear of losing control and the safety that he had created.
All his cold swims and long walks and bold declarations in Parliament couldn’t change one thing.
He was terrified that if he gave his love away, he would lose it. Once again, he would be abandoned and alone.
But there was one true thing: for the first time in his entire life, he’d felt safe, truly safe, with Beatrice, and he had thrown it away with a few words.