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M illie Yardley carried a bouquet of English roses. Like her, they had been grown in her mother’s garden.

In her hair, she wore a crown of morning glories. Purple and blue.

In her pocket, she carried something borrowed: a dart, bent at the tip, from Brigid’s Forge. When her groom had asked her why on earth she’d chosen that, she’d only smiled at him. Later, she thought, later she’d tell him that he was the reason it was bent.

Her wedding shoes were something new, a gift from the Countesses Bentley, embroidered with silver quills.

At the altar, Abraham Murphy stood, his posture perfectly formal, but his expression altogether too giddy for the staunch confines of the church. And bless him, it made her smile too; it made her smile until her face hurt, all the way through their vows.

When the vicar declared them married and they had kissed to finalize the process, she had pulled back, looking into the face of the man she loved with something not unlike wonder.

“Have I told you,” he whispered under the applause, “how very much I love you, Millie Yardley?”

“Millie Murphy,” she had corrected, shivering at the sound of it. “And you tell me that every time you speak.”

“Not in so many words,” he chuckled, before taking her by the hand and leading her back down the aisle.

Millie realized this was true. He had said it without saying it all along. And so had she.

She waited until they were outside, in the hot embrace of the London summer, the smell of gardens and weeds sweetening the air and the roll of dark clouds in the distance promising a nourishing rain.

She waited until she was standing on fertile soil, and she looked at him to say, “I love you back, Abe. With all that I am.”

Their wedding breakfast was held at the Fletcher-Cain house, sprawled out in the same pink foyer where their engagement had been unwittingly announced.

Mrs. Knox, so long a staple in that home, attended not as a servant but as a guest, never leaving Percy Fletcher’s side.

It was, as Dot had described it some weeks earlier, “Not just a kiss, after all.”

The truly wonderful thing, as far as Millie was concerned, was that no one seemed to much notice or mind the change.

It simply was, the way a new shoot or leaf simply was when it appeared on a particularly beloved old flower bush, one that never needed trimming or shaping, and simply lived as it was born in the wild.

The oddest attendee, though, was her errant brother-in-law, who had returned from Dover victorious and—by Millie’s estimation—somewhat changed.

She had found him in the midst of the celebrations, making himself very small in a corner of the party and watching as though he were only being permitted inside to observe, not to participate.

“I never thanked you, Freddy,” she said to him, sitting beside him on the cushioned sill of the window.

“Thanked me?” he repeated, bafflement clear in his voice, holding a glass of what looked like simple water.

“For taking care of Gretchen and Paula,” Millie clarified with a little laugh. “For believing they deserved to be safe and making it so.”

“Of course they deserved to be safe,” Freddy had mumbled, gruffness apparently substituting for humility.

“Not every man would think so,” Millie pressed. “And even if they did think so, not many would actually go about putting themselves into the fray to ensure it.”

“Well,” said Freddy Hightower, averting his eyes. “You’re welcome, then. I suppose.”

“I know this is strange, Freddy,” Millie continued, reaching out to touch his hand with a careful gentleness, as if she did not want to startle a thing so recently tamed. “But we will find our way through it.”

He did startle at that, looking at her hand and then lifting his eyes to her face. “I can’t believe you agreed to let me stay,” he confessed quickly, like he wanted to say it before he could talk himself out of it. “It won’t be forever.”

“I know that,” she said.

“Cresson’s going to Portugal,” Freddy continued, nodding toward the man in question, who was currently accepting a glass of wine from Ember Donnelly like he wasn’t sure if it would burn his fingers when he touched it.

“He asked if I’d consider keeping up his flat, watering the plants, dusting the books, that sort of thing.

He recited some nonsense about empty chairs, a parable, I suppose, but not one I was ever taught. ”

“Nor I,” Millie admitted, giving a second, thoughtful look at the enigmatic Mr. Cresson. “Is that something you want to do?”

Freddy nodded. “Yes, I think so,” he said, his shoulders relaxing a little and a faint look of something like happiness testing itself on his face. “It’ll be an experience, if nothing else.”

“That was exactly the same thought I had,” she told him, “when your mother asked me to be her companion. I thought it would be an experience, if nothing else.”

“And it was,” he said with a tentative ghost of a smile.

“It was,” she agreed.

They sat together for a while in comfortable silence.

Lady Bentley was admiring the cake, looking to be chattering with Hannah Lazarus about the quality of its frosting.

Abe was performing a pantomime about the ejection of Mr. Waters for Silas and Dot.

Millie’s own parents were reacting to the news of Percy Fletcher and Mrs. Knox with what looked like a combination of inevitability and the surprise such a thing is due.

And the cat, Silas’s one-eared cat, Queen Mab, was perched on a column, lazily licking her paw until such a moment as Abe might look her way, during which she snapped to attention, glaring into his very soul.

Abe had noticed and kept trying to keep his back to her.

Dom Raul, however, was lavishing her with attention and little morsels from his own plate. He turned every now and then to comment upon something he had observed at the party, and she listened with apparent respect and interest. It was, Millie suspected, just salt in the wound for poor Abe.

“I’ve had a letter from Claire,” said Millie, as though it were a casual thing, nothing for Freddy to balk at. “Your Oliver has said his first word. Claire was very put out that it was not any variation of her name or status as mother.”

“What was it?” Freddy asked, careful and a bit restrained, his body having gone very still.

“It was doggy ,” said Millie, allowing herself to laugh at it. “Claire blames your grandmother.”

“Claire is right,” Freddy replied, allowing himself to smile over this news like it was his right to hear it. “Tommy loves her little dogs.”

“Your mother said the very same thing,” Millie told him, sharing that little smile, allowing it to be what it was, just for this moment.

“Thank you for that, by the way,” said Freddy a breath later. “For telling her I did something right. For letting her feel proud, for once.”

“She was always proud,” Millie told him. “She told me so herself.”

She touched his hand again, observing again that glass of water he’d chosen over the bounty of wine, and told him she hoped he’d join the party, if he felt up to it.

She wove through the well-wishes and questions and insinuations and so on. She joined Abe as he finished the story he was telling to Dot and Silas, rolling her eyes at the ways he’d embellished it.

“And I lifted him straight off the floor and threw him in an arc off my threshold and into the street!” Abe insisted, providing a full-body demonstration of his heroics. “Didn’t I, love? She saw it.”

“Something like that,” Millie replied, making the other two laugh.

“Silas has a case for us,” Abe told her, turning with a sparkle in his eyes. “For when we get back from Aberdeen.”

“Oh, not business,” said Silas immediately, looking embarrassed by the very suggestion of it. “Not at your wedding.”

“My dear,” Dot said with a titter, “what else is there for people like us?”

When they walked away, leaving her alone with her new husband, Millie turned to him with a happy sigh and said, “She’s right, you know.”

“I know,” he agreed with a chuckle. They had already spent a portion of their wedding day planning the new changes to their business, allocating the generous sums Abe had collected from both Freddy and Lady Bentley for their respective hirings over the Season.

Millie had initiated as many of those conversations as Abe had, so it surprised her when he asked, “Does it trouble you? Talking about it today?”

“It does not. At all.” She sighed, rising to her tiptoes to drop a kiss on his lips, enjoying the nervous flutter in her chest at the fact that she could do this now, as often as she wished, right in public. “In fact, it was making me think.”

“Oh, no,” said Abe with a chuckle. “And what did you think, my love?”

“I think,” she replied, breathing in the moment and releasing it again, reveling in its perfection, “I think I know what I want to write next.”