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Marcia started forward.

She’d left.

He’d watched from the windows, his soul crushed, and his heart dying as she’d allowed Wessex to hand her up.

And with her had gone his every reason for living, and smiling, and laughing.

Only, she was… back.

He felt her before he heard her.

A pad filled with notes rested beside him, his charcoal pencil atop it. Andrew had set aside his work and given his attention to nothing other than the heavily clouded London sky.

He waited for her to call out a boisterous greeting, as she’d always done.

He wondered if it would be the singsong greeting she sang sometimes when she saw him, or whether she’d sneak forward and burst upon him, attempting to scare him with her stealthy approach.

In the end, she did none of those things.

She moved quietly, her steps careful in ways that were unlike her.

She’d changed.

She’d never been cautious around him.

With their marriage, he’d gone and changed her.

His gut clenched at the realization.

But it was Marcia.

She had come back.

Which meant she’d not left him.

Yet.

“Marcciaaaa Grayyy. Marcia Grayyyy.” He sang that song for her as much as for himself.

“Andrew Barrettt. Andrew Barreett,” she returned in that same tune in her same discordant little way.

Despite all that had haunted him this evening, he found himself smiling.

As though that greeting they’d used so often with each other had broken her out of the melancholy that had hovered like a life force in the gardens, Marcia, her hair plaited, wearing a modest wrapper, dropped down onto the ground beside him.

She set the plate down on the ground beside her and pushed it closer to him.

His gaze went to the items heaped upon the wood dish: a Banbury cake. A ratafia cake. An almond-jam tart.

His heart tripped its beat.

They were… all of his favorites. Surely that meant something. Surely…

Surely you’re seeing what you want to see.

“You should be resting,” he gently chided.

“I was unable to sleep,” she confessed, resting her chin atop her knees. She stared out at a pair of dunnock birds hopping along the overgrown earth. Distractedly, she reached for something on her plate—one of the biscuits—and proceeded to pick off little pieces to toss them at their nocturnal visitors.