Page 11 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
Mercy had returned to her room just minutes before Mother and the girls had arrived home. The whole household had gone off to bed an hour or so ago, leaving Thomas alone and awake in the depths of the night. Probably he ought to have gone to bed as well, but he doubted he would have managed more than to lay in bed and stare at the ceiling until dawn came pouring through the nearest window.
Father had been dead for over three years, now. He hadn’t even realized that the anniversary of Father’s passing had come and gone until nearly a week afterward. Possibly the girls hadn’t either, though he doubted Mother had managed to let it slip her mind. The truth of it was that none of them had much missed him.
The deeper truth of it was, he’d never really gone. He’d passed, God rot his miserable soul, but he’d not left. No longer burdened by the deficiencies of a mortal body, he had haunted his son. Thomas had lived these last years with his father’s voice settled right at the back of his brain, an ever-present thrum within his very skull to remind him in perpetuity of just what a failure he had been. What a disappointment he was. How far he had fallen from expectations.
He knew well enough what Father would say of him now. He could see it even, in his mind’s eye: the sneer, the faint curl of his lip, the cutting gaze that could take strips off of his hide with the smallest glance. I knew you would be the ruin of this family, that insidious little voice jeered, and the sound rolled through his brain with an unsettling malevolence. I knew never to expect better of you. And only look—you have reduced the family to this. To the indignity of being beholden to the good will of Augustus Fletcher. Like a dog on a lead.
Thomas pulled his spectacles off of his face and scrubbed at his aching eyes. Father had always had the power to reduce him to an almost childlike state, yearning for an approval that would never come. He’d apologized to Mercy this evening, and Father—Father would have loathed that. A sign of weakness, he would have thought. He’d have applauded Thomas for having put Mercy in her rightful place, which was inextricably and unquestionably beneath him.
All these years he’d held an image of her in his mind, one that had been formed by his father since childhood. A hoyden; a hellion. Half-wild, and no better than she ought to be, given her common roots. Her very existence had been an offense in itself, Thomas thought. Her father’s wealth an even worse one.
Father had never liked her. He’d never approved of her friendship with Marina and Juliet. But then, Father had spent as little time as was possible in the countryside, preferring the amusements to be found in town—and Mother had disregarded his grumbling about it in his absence.
Like his father, he’d made so damned many assumptions of her. Unfair ones, he supposed, and even untrue ones. He’d taken offense at so simple, so generous a gesture as the offer of gowns, which he had assumed to be cast-offs, when they’d never even been worn. He’d been so damned determined to view her through the lens his father had given to him, and he had never bothered to consider whether or not he truly shared that judgment. He’d said terrible things of her within her own home, and she—
She had been so much kinder about it than she had had to be. Than he had any right at all to expect. She’d have been within her rights to write to her father and have the lot of them cast out into the streets. But she hadn’t. Instead she had humored Mother’s insistence upon her attendance at social functions, and weathered a terminally boring ball despite the humiliation of it all.
Irreverent Mercy might be. Reckless and uncontrollable, that much was true—he had the bend in the frame of his spectacles to prove it. But above everything else, she was kind and loyal and generous. Generous enough even to deny herself the catharsis of a shoulder to cry on, when it might have meant dashing Marina’s romantic notions of the Season she had so cherished.
For the space of a half an hour as they had conversed in the library, that nasty little voice that had lived in the back of his mind these last three years had quieted. There had been no hissing, spiteful recriminations there to allow him to justify to himself his own poor behavior, his cruel words—whether or not she’d been meant to hear them.
There had just been the shame of having been overheard. Of having said those hateful words to begin with. He doubted she’d even intended to give it to him, but still he’d been unable to meet her direct, forthright gaze. For once, that shame had been entirely self-inflicted. There was an undeniable sort of novelty in it, to be directed by his own conscience rather than his father’s lingering voice.
It hadn’t lasted, of course. A temporary reprieve at most, one which had vanished with a vengeance as soon as the household had gone to bed and Thomas had been left alone in Mr. Fletcher’s study with his thoughts and the most recent missive from Mr. Sumner’s investigator.
Father wouldn’t have approved of Thomas cutting short the inquiries he’d been making around Cheapside, where Fordham—that villain—had last been seen making free with the family funds in order to attend, however briefly, Juliet’s first ball.
But Mercy, he thought, would have.
∞∞∞
Fordham’s rented flat had been abandoned, and his office shuttered. None of those living or working nearby, to whom Thomas had posed delicate, innocuous questions, had recalled seeing the man inside of the last month.
His best lead had been a tavern in Cheapside, which had come to Thomas’ notice by way of the investigator whom Mr. Sumner had engaged. Fordham had been something of a regular, he was given to understand—and he had last been seen within only days ago.
The damned villain had gone to ground. It was the only explanation. It could not have escaped his notice that Thomas’ family had arrived in London for the Season, and he had to have known that his theft had not gone unnoticed. That there would be some effort made to locate him, to recover the funds he had stolen.
And yet, if the investigator were to be believed, the man had made no effort to leave the country. Had, in fact, not even left London. What was Fordham playing at?
Thomas turned up the collar of his coat to ward away the evening chill as he trudged back toward the Fletcher Townhouse to change his clothing from the plain things he’d donned for this afternoon’s search into something more suitable to put in an appearance toward the end of whatever this evening’s schedule of events had been meant to be. It had been difficult to find a balance, pitting the necessity of tracking down Fordham against his family’s busy social life.
Most days he went without dinner, the time for it lost in the travel from one part of town to another. Just occasionally he was lucky enough to catch a quick meal from some shop that had not yet closed down for the evening. Tonight there was only one shop upon the street with windows still lit, and he wouldn’t be finding anything there to ease his appetite, unless one considered books good eating.
Food for the mind, he thought, as he glanced through the window at the display arranged within it. But not so much the body.
He paused before the window, his eye drawn to an oversized book just there at the bottom left. A sketchbook, he thought, owing to the size of its cover, which was tightly bound in cloth. Not just any cloth—Mercy’s cloth. He recognized the pattern, having seen it within the pages of the sketchbook Mercy had given into his keeping. It was the very same one he had upon that waistcoat which Mother had remarked upon.
He oughtn’t to have been surprised. Marina and Juliet had said that the fabric was still prized, still valuable. They had, after all, massacred a great number of Mercy’s old gowns with other esteemed prints and weaves in the service of refashioning some of them into accessories. But still, just the very fact that he’d found something here in this little bookshop, entirely at random, managed to hook the ghost of a smile into his face. A strange coincidence in and of itself, and—
Mercy needed a new sketchbook. Not wanted. Needed. Several times since she’d handed over hers to him, he’d seen her make some absent motion, as if to reach for it, only for her brows to draw in consternation to find it missing. A habitual action, he thought, to sketch whenever she had the inclination, the time. Whenever she was bored, or at loose ends, or even just when the turn of the conversation had failed to spark an interest in her. She missed it like she would a lost limb.
She still sketched whenever possible, upon whatever scraps of paper she’d managed to find. Half of them she’d left strewn about the house, and those he’d found he’d scrupulous collected and left for her upon the desk in the library. It was the binding, he thought, that she needed most. Order kept for her, in string and glue, compiled neatly in one place.
Hell. It was not going to leave his mind. He was simply going to have to buy it for her.
Moments later, the sketchbook was in his possession, tucked beneath his arm as he once more headed for home. Marina had not exaggerated; the shopkeeper had wanted an exorbitant sum for it for the rarity of the cloth which had been used to cover it. But it would please Mercy, he thought, to have her personal mark of ownership upon her most treasured possession. Like a secret signature.
Strangely, it pleased Thomas to have found it. To have purchased it. To imagine what her face would reveal when he laid it into her hands. Why the devil did the thought make his heart beat faster?
He shook his head as if to clear it. No; that would make it too personal a thing. It had been a practical purchase, really, only a replacement for the one she’d given him. He’d simply leave it upon the desk in the library, where she could most frequently be found sketching, and be done with it.
And he’d keep the damned gloves he’d still not returned to her into the bargain. A fair enough trade, he thought.
∞∞∞
“Well done,”
Thomas said as he retrieved his cue ball from the pocket into which Mercy had sunk it and placed it back upon the billiard table. “Tricky angle.”
Mercy shrugged as she applied chalk once more to the tip of her cue. “Perhaps, for some less-skilled players,”
she said loftily, with an arch of her brow that was no doubt intended to remind him that his score presently trailed hers by a full three points.
Thomas chuckled. “I suppose I assumed that you had an inflated sense of your own skill,”
he said, amused to see the wrinkle of offense that settled itself between her brows. He adjusted his cue, drew it back, and sank her cue ball—though in all honesty, the shot had been less difficult than the one she had made. Still, it put him within a point of her score once again.
“Hardly,”
Mercy sniffed as she bent over the table once more, lining up her next shot. “I’ve played billiards with Papa since before I was tall enough to see over the table.”
“How did you manage that?” he asked.
“The judicious use of a chair upon which to stand.”
Another shot. She’d gone for the red ball this time, and it slipped into the corner pocket, placing her once more firmly in the lead. “Your turn.”
Hell. Thomas considered himself a competent enough player, but Mercy was something more than quite good at billiards. Even with the constriction of the ball gown she’d not bothered to change out of, she was a better player than most men he knew. Decisive and cunning, he could almost see her calculating angles in her head as she surveyed the table, effortlessly finding the proper angle from which to shoot.
He was going to have to cheat to win, he thought, as he settled for sinking her cue ball. Or, at least, get as close to cheating as his rather rigid principles would allow.
She bent over the table once again, concentration firmly fixed upon her target, and he waited until she had drawn the cue back to ask, “What were you doing in Cheapside?”
Her arm trembled, and the tip of the cue scratched along the green baize-covered surface of the table, missing the ball entirely. Thomas coughed into his fist. “That’s a foul, I believe,”
he said, striving for an innocent inflection. “Loss of a point.”
“You meant to foul my aim!”
Mercy complained as she stepped back from the table. “That’s hardly fair.”
“A truly competent player knows how to play even with such distractions,”
Thomas said, suppressing a snicker as he stepped up to the table once more. If he could sink the red ball himself, that would put them equal at last in points.
Perhaps he might have a prayer of eking out a victory yet. He pulled back the cue—
“What were you doing in Cheapside?”
Mercy asked, tartly.
Scratch. The cue missed the ball, and his hopes of victory went up in a puff of smoke. “How the hell did you know I’d gone to Cheapside?”
he groused as he rose.
“The coachman complained of it,”
she said. “When I took the carriage home alone from the ball. Said you’d asked him to deliver you to Cheapside on more than one occasion.”
“Your servants are a little freer with their gossip than I’d like.”
“Yes, well, he’s had to do rather more shuffling people about the city than is quite usual for him. I suppose he’s entitled to be a bit sour about it.”
This time, she took her shot while speaking, and neatly sank the red ball he’d missed before he could distract her, clinching the game entirely. “What were you doing in Cheapside, then?”
“I believe when I asked you a similar question, you rather condescendingly informed me that it was too personal a question,” he said.
“So I did,”
she allowed, as she collected the ivory billiard balls from the table and returned them to their silk-lined case. “But then I am notoriously nosy, so I can be forgiven for asking all the same.”
“Can you?”
Incredibly, he wanted to laugh. Laugh!
“I ought to be, given that I certainly didn’t shout at you for undertaking the very same action as I.”
Mercy wrested his cue from him, though he was loath to relinquish it. She’d been entitled to boast over her victory, so it rather surprised him that she hadn’t.
“I did not leave the house unaccompanied in the dead of night,”
he said. “But I’ll make you another deal. You tell me what you were doing, and I’ll tell you what I was doing.”
For a moment, perhaps a bit longer, she genuinely seemed to consider the offer, canting her head and peering at him as if she could see into his damned soul. “No,”
she said at last. “I think not.”
Which was a shame, when he considered that he thought they’d been getting on rather well this last half hour or so. At least, he hadn’t been tempted to throttle her, and she hadn’t needled him at every potential opportunity.
It wasn’t so much that he wanted to confide in her so much as he thought she could be confided in. Probably she was an excellent keeper of secrets, given that she guarded her own so closely.
“Shame,”
he said. “And here I thought we were getting along so well. Would you care for a drink?”
He nodded his head to indicate the sideboard set against the far wall.
“No, I thank you.”
The muted gold silk of her skirts swished across the floor as she retreated toward a couch and sank onto it with a sigh, briefly revealing her stockinged feet, since she’d absently discarded her slippers upon the staircase—which she had done several times in recent memory. “But do help yourself,”
she added. “Papa keeps liquor in nearly every social room of the house. He says it makes visitors somewhat more pleasant.”
“To him, or for him?”
“Do you know, I never thought it prudent to ask.”
The quirk of her lips suggested she had been amused by the question. “It was good of you,”
she said, “to allow me to leave when I had done with the ball this evening.”
Ah, yes. She had tired of waiting at the edge of the ballroom inside of an hour, though she had waited a half an hour after her single dance—with him—to do it. And she had, in point of fact, turned out to be a fine dancer. Light, graceful, elegant. “I said I would,”
he replied as he poured himself a glass of brandy. “It was good of you not to step on my toes.”
“I was tempted, I’ll admit. If only because you should have been obliged to pretend that I had not, and I would have found it terribly amusing.”
She toyed with a curl that had come down from its pins, wrapping it about her index finger in a perfect spiral until it bounced free. And once again she wound it up around her finger, as if she found the repetitive action somehow soothing. “I don’t think your mother believed me about the headache, though.”
“In fact, she did not.”
But then, he’d told Mother in advance of the bargain he had made with Mercy, in an effort to convince her to let Mercy leave when she wished. “Still, she was glad of your company. Perhaps, if you had stayed a bit longer—”
And there; she turned up her nose at him immediately. “What, perhaps someone else would have asked me to dance?”
“There is always that possibility, yes,”
he said as he sipped. “Regrettably, some gentlemen will only follow where others lead. They’ll clamber to introduce themselves to a woman who has already acquired more than her fair share of attention, but shy away from requesting an introduction to a lady who is—”
“Unpopular,”
Mercy interjected sourly, and that curl sprang free of her finger once more as she folded her arms over her chest. “Past her prime. Beneath his social class.”
“I was going to say an unknown,”
Thomas said, with a lift of his brows. But she’d expected him to say worse, and that—that was some excoriating critique of his character on its own. He supposed he could not hold it against her; he’d been at least half an arse to her for nearly twenty years now, when he hadn’t been avoiding her at any and every opportunity. But there hadn’t been even the tiniest whisper of his father’s voice in his mind the whole evening, and that was something to her credit. That with her very presence she silenced that nasty, subversive murmur in his mind.
“Oh,”
Mercy said, and her shoulders drooped to a noticeably less defensive angle. “And which are you, then? Leader or follower?”
“Oh, follower, without question,”
Thomas said, absent hesitation, and he leaned back against the wall, crossing one ankle over the other. “All my life, unfortunately. Father made right certain of that.”
Mercy’s brows pinched together, her lips pursing as if against an unwise remark. “I’m sorry,”
she said. And then a moment later, she decided to let that unwise comment loose anyway. “I never liked your father.”
Thomas felt a startled laugh climb up his throat. “Yes, well, neither did any of us. I suppose he must’ve been pleasant enough at one point—at least pleasant enough to convince Mother to wed him—but he was an arse as far back as my memory goes.”
He rolled his shoulders in an uncomfortable shrug. “I hear his voice in my head on occasion,”
he confessed. More occasions, really, than he would have liked to admit even to himself. “Chiding me for some infraction or other, or undertaking some action of which he would have disapproved. Only—”
Mercy inclined her head, expression free of anything but curiosity. Not a shred of judgment, no matter how queer a thing to which he had just confessed. “Only?”
she prompted.
“Only just lately, that voice has begun to sound less like Father’s and more like my own,”
he said. And he hated it. Hated that somewhere along the way he had become his own worst enemy, made himself into the very manner of man he had wanted to avoid becoming. A man in the image of the father who had never truly earned that appellation.
There had been a time he had been so damned jealous of Mercy, for her loving, attentive father. Who had let her do things no girl ought to have been permitted to do, and who had laughed with her and played with her as he had wished his father would have done with him, back when he had foolishly, childishly, nurtured some faint hope of earning his father’s love.
Instead his father had found only flaws within him to be eradicated. With extreme prejudice. And he found himself confessing another unpleasant truth. “Luckily, Father reserved the worst of his recriminations for me, and so the girls were spared the worst of his venom,”
he said down into his glass. “I had the most dreadful stammer as a child. I still do, on rare occasions, when I’m under particular stress or otherwise agitated.”
“Yes, I know,”
Mercy said softly.
Thomas’ head jerked up. “You do?”
“Of course. There have been times it would have been terribly difficult to miss.”
“But you never said anything.”
“What should I have said?”
And there, that was genuine confusion on her face as she tipped her head to the right in inquiry. “I imagine it troubled you enough without my having made note of it to you. What purpose would be served in calling attention to it, except perhaps to make you feel embarrassed of it?”
Father had thought nothing of making him feel embarrassed and ashamed. He had used that shame as a motivational tool, striving to drive the stammer out of him with the heavy-handed use of it. And here was Mercy—a woman he’d never been particularly kind to—who, as it turned out, had been kinder to him all his life than he had ever known. “Father was fond of mockery,”
he said. And all it had done was turned him ever more quiet; sullen, even. “Even Mother, well-intentioned as she is, has long had the habit of attempting to finish my sentences for me.”
Which had been frustrating in its own way.
“Probably there was no need for that. You’ve always gotten your words out eventually,”
Mercy said. “There’s nothing wrong with requiring a little more time to do so.”
Quite abruptly it occurred to him that he had not, as an adult, stammered in her presence. Even at his most agitated, in his moments of highest stress and strain—most frequently caused by her. Because she had, somehow, been comfortable? Safe?
Thomas scoffed. “To hear Father speak of it, one would have thought it was a cardinal sin.”
At least, he had always been made to feel that it was so. Father had never understood that all his mockery and reproach had never once aided Thomas in his attempt to speak through the tie of his tongue, the peculiar thickness of his throat. That each glare and glower had merely tightened that knot, stymied the words he had struggled to speak. “Sometimes,”
he said, “it’s as if my mind moves too quickly for speech, and my tongue is two sentences behind, stuck around a word.”
An occurrence that had always left him feeling slow and stupid, clumsy in his expression of thought.
“Busy brain,”
Mercy said absently, and her hands drifted to her lap, smoothing at the gold silk of her skirts.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Busy brain,”
she said again. “That’s what I call mine. Often, my mind leaps from one thought to the next indiscriminately. It can make it difficult to hold a conversation, you understand. It might feel as though that conversation has slowed to a crawl, and that I am suddenly fifteen minutes ahead of where I ought to be, already arrived to a place that the conversation has not yet reached.”
She braced one elbow upon the arm of the couch, set her chin in her palm. “Sometimes it does, eventually,”
she said. “And sometimes I’ve jumped to a place it was never going, and I’ve lost the thread of the conversation entirely. My brain is just too busy to move at the snail’s pace of most conversations, and my attention is often too fleeting a thing to remain engaged upon any one subject.”
“That sounds”—unusual—“aggravating.”
She managed a shrug, a tiny lift and fall of her shoulders that sent her sleeve slipping down her right arm. “It is frustrating, certainly,”
she said. “For no one so much as me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t intend to be odd or difficult or—or absent-minded,”
she said, casting out the final phrase as if it had been a pejorative of the worst sort. “It’s never intentional. It just happens. I have endless attention for the things that interest me—so much so that I’ve forgotten to eat and lost track of time entirely. To the point that it might feel as though hours have passed in an instant, midnight arriving when I would swear it had been noon only minutes before. Conversely, I have never been able to fix my attention to a task I find unpleasant—or sometimes even to a task I might find pleasant, could I summon the inclination to begin with it. I might read the same page of the same book ten times or more, but find my mind has wandered away each time.”
By the strained tone of her voice, Thomas surmised that it had not been an easy admission to make. “Go on,”
he said, and hoped she had interpreted it as encouraging.
She heaved a sigh, and her dark eyes shifted away from his as she tucked her chin down into her palm as if to hide her face. “I’ve missed myriad appointments, been appallingly late more often than I’d care to admit,”
she said, “and lost or forgotten more things than I can count. It makes no difference how important that object might be. Have you any idea how frustrating it is to lose something you would swear had been in your hand only moments before?”
“Like the key,”
he said. “The one you neglected to take the night you left the house.”
“I maintain I would have remembered that one,”
she said, a pleat of pique appearing between her brows. “If you had not—”
“Let’s not,”
he said, biting back a shred of a laugh, “or I’ll be obligated to take you to task for it once more.”
Wisely, Mercy snapped her mouth shut. “Like the key,”
she allowed, with a little hunch of her shoulders. “Or my sketchbook. My hats, my gloves.”
A pink flush drifted across her cheeks and there was a faint rustle of silk as her legs shifted minutely beneath her skirts. “My slippers,”
she added.
“You left them on the stairs when we came up,”
he said. “You usually do, in fact. I’ve tripped over them a half a dozen times already. Damn near broke my neck stumbling over them once, in the early hours of the morning.”
“I’m sorry,”
she said. “Really, I never mean to do it. It’s just—”
“Habit, I’d guess,”
he interjected. “A wholly unconscious one, most likely. I take it you do the same at home?”
“Yes,”
she said on a sigh. “The servants have grown accustomed to my eccentricities over the years. Most often, by the time I discover something is missing, it’s been found and returned to my room. I’m certain I’ve annoyed our cook far too often for something cold to eat because I’ve forgotten the time and missed a proper meal.”
Mercy managed a little laugh, flat and self-derisive. “In fact, it would be fairer to say the servants have all been managing around me for most of my life. I can’t manage to concentrate upon things like dinner menus, or which linens need to be replaced, or even tallying the accounting books. Arithmetic bores me to tears,”
she said. “I suppose you were right there. I’ve never been particularly proficient in it.”
“But you are clever,”
he said. “You managed to repair that hot air balloon on your own. Your father said he didn’t think you would do it—and yet you did.”
“I was interested,”
she stressed. “But you’re mistaken. He thought I wouldn’t because I often don’t. Our country house is often littered with unfinished projects; things I began with all good intent and then lost interest in. I suspect it’s been some years since I’ve finished so much as a needlework sampler,”
she said, abashed. With a jerky motion, her hands fell into her lap, fingers fidgeting with the smooth silk of her skirts. “It’s not my competence that is at issue. It’s my attention.”
He had been so wrong. About everything. So many behaviors he had attributed to her station, or to her father’s overindulgence, or to a flagrant disregard for propriety, or to a basic lack of respect and consideration. It had never been that, any of it. It had just been Mercy, swimming upstream against a current she could not control. One that controlled her instead.
“The worst—the absolute worst,”
she said, her eyes glittering, “is enduring well-meaning suggestions such as, ‘If you only tried harder, Mercy.’”
Her hands flew up in a little gesture of agitation, as if she were tempted to pull out her hair with the aggravation of it. “I have,”
she declared, the pitch of her voice wobbling across octaves in its strident insistence. “I have tried! I have tried, all my life.”
Yes; he supposed she must have done. He had done his damnedest to master his stammer, and still it clawed at his throat from time to time. Most often, especially in his younger days, it had mastered him, and no amount of Father’s reproach had made it cease. How condescending, he thought, to reduce such afflictions to a matter of simply trying harder. “I was not going to suggest it,”
he said. “I’ve had enough of that myself.”
For once, she looked at him with something akin to gratitude. A commonality, he thought, that neither of them had known they shared. “Suppose I suggested to someone that if they only gave it their best effort, they might simply alight into the air and take flight with the birds,”
she said tartly.
Thomas chuckled. “An impossibility, regardless.”
“It’s the same for me,”
she said, and that glitter within her eyes became the glassy sheen of encroaching tears. “It shouldn’t be. I know it shouldn’t. Have you any idea how aggravating, how demoralizing it can be to see someone half your age—younger even—complete a task with such ease, and yet be unable to do the same?”
She gave a little sniff, scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. “Juliet devotes an hour of her time thrice a week to practicing the pianoforte. I might manage to plunk out a few notes before my mind wanders away from me.”
As if the act itself were a labor Sisyphean in its difficulty, which he supposed to her, it must be. “I know I should do these things. I want to do them—at least, I want to want to do them.”
But it did not render them any more possible, or any less frustrating. He knew it all better than most; knew that same frustration, that anxiety…that self-deprecation. They had always had this much in common. He had just never allowed himself to know her well enough to learn it. He had held her to the very same standards which he had found unfair himself when his father had inflicted them upon him.
“I understand,”
he said, and he thought that at last, he truly did. Understand her. Perhaps he even understood himself better than he once had, like a key had been turned in a lock somewhere in the darkened recesses of his mind, and all those bits of himself he’d tucked away at Father’s insistence had at last come tumbling back out. Not pretty; not elegant. But real.
Hell. He’d spent so long judging Mercy for things beyond her control, for all the prejudices and criticisms his father had crammed into his head over the years, that he’d never once stopped to consider that it might be possible to like her. Even to admire her, after a fashion.
Perhaps it was time to let it go at last. His resentments, unearned as they had been. The small and petty part of him that had so fiercely clung to his preconceived notions of her, steadfastly refusing to change. Even Father’s voice there at the back of his mind, which existed only to flagellate him with his own inadequacies.
Perhaps it was time to be a man of his own making, rather than a mouse of his father’s.