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Jo had learned to live alongside small lies.
Not the grand ones—those that demand an entire lifetime to uphold—but the others: the domestic, discreet kind, the ones that settle into the margins of daily life and repeat themselves like a prayer until they become habit.
They were easy to maintain. They required no major reinforcement. It was enough to check on them from time to time, the way one inspects an old beam that still serves its purpose.
Laurie did not look at her with desire.
That was the first.
A simple, solid pillar on which everything else rested.
The second was that, if she sometimes felt that uncomfortable pressure in her chest when he entered a room, it had nothing directly to do with his presence. It was fatigue. Age. The accumulation of responsibilities. Plumfield always demanded more than it seemed. Poorly distributed weight has a way of deceiving the body.
And the third—the most important—was that she was no longer that woman. Nor was he that man. They had changed. Structures age. They adapt. They learn to hold themselves up differently.
With those three truths properly set in place, everything else could be explained.
Or, at the very least, kept standing.
Take, for instance, the fall.
It was clumsy, absurd, very Jo: the treacherous edge of the path, a book tucked under her arm, gravity doing what it always does. Laurie reacted before anyone else. He knelt in front of her with a haste she preferred to call habit, and lifted the hem of her skirt with a care that bordered on reverence.
He cleaned the wound.
Calmly.
With focus.
With both hands.
There was nothing strange in that. It was a minor correction. A necessary adjustment.
That his fingers lingered over the bare skin of her leg was, evidently, a medical necessity. Knees are complex areas. They require assessment. Pressure. Prolonged contact. The thumb tracing a slow, almost absentminded line right where the skin began to turn sensitive carried no symbolic weight. It was basic anatomy.
The skin was warm from the sun. No one else would have noticed that warmth.
That she did, on the other hand, was of no importance.
And if, in doing so, Laurie let out a sigh—brief, controlled—it was surely from the discomfort of seeing her hurt. That made sense. The only thing that didn’t was the thought that his hands knew exactly how long to wait before withdrawing.
When he finished, he looked up. Jo refused to think about how he held her. About how his hands seemed to remember the exact weight of her leg, the precise curve. About how he let go with a care that was slightly reluctant, as if something in him didn’t yet want to move away.
None of that was desire.
It was muscle memory. Such a thing existed. Of course it did.
Nor was it true that Laurie watched her when he thought she wasn’t noticing.
If his eyes followed her around the room with that quiet, persistent attention, as though Jo were an idea that needed to be reviewed more than once… well, that was an old habit. The reflex of locating what matters within a space. The way one identifies a column before placing weight on it. Something that had stayed with him since childhood.
When his gaze drifted downward, slow and deliberate, in no hurry to return, while she leaned over the desks, it wasn’t contemplation; he must have been distracted. Thinking of something else. Of Amy, perhaps. Of Europe. Of paintings and well-lit salons.
Certainly not of the firm line of her back, nor of the way Jo had learned to inhabit her body with a confidence she did not possess in her twenties.
That would be ridiculous.
And if he had come to Plumfield alone—again—that was perfectly understandable. Amy hated long journeys, dusty roads, rural inconveniences. They gave her headaches. Laurie had always been attentive to such things. A good husband. A devoted husband.
His habit of always finding a different reason to stay longer—an unfinished conversation, a forgotten book, a walk that “would be a shame not to take”—implied no insistence whatsoever. It was courtesy. No one would accuse a man of desiring a woman simply because he cannot manage to leave her house.
That would be absurd.
That was what Jo told herself as she watched him move through the house with the ease of someone who had never stopped belonging there: he knew where the wood creaked, which step to avoid, where the light fell in the late afternoon.
When they spoke of the past, there was nothing reproachable there either.
Laurie didn’t remember just anything. He remembered exactly what he shouldn’t. Not the important events, but the dangerous moments, small fissures in memory through which everything else seeps: the sound of her laughter on a specific afternoon, the way Jo sat at the piano and seemed brighter than the sky itself, a passing phrase he had kept the way one keeps a relic.
“It never felt like that again,” he would say, without explaining what that was.
“Do you remember when we used to build castles in the air…?”
“I always thought that day…” he would add, with the caution of someone testing the ground before stepping forward.
Nostalgia. Pure nostalgia. Not longing.
Jo knew the difference. Nostalgia is harmless, almost elegant. And if his voice grew lower, more intimate, as though those words should not be shared with anyone else, that only proved sensitivity. Laurie had always been sensitive.
That he chose those memories and not others could be attributed to chance.
That he spoke them with an intensity unfit for the past was coincidence.
That he offered them halfway between anecdote and confession was… her imagination.
Jo insisted on believing it.
She believed it as they walked through the garden and she felt his closeness turn into a gentle but persistent electric current, propping up a gaze she had spent years pretending was stable.
She believed it when Laurie laughed with the children and then looked at her—not seeking approval, but offering something unspoken.
She believed it when, upon parting, his hand lingered just a second longer over hers.
Her ideas.
Unnecessary constructions.
That night, however, Laurie didn’t leave.
Not when the clock struck the prudent hour.
Not when the house began to darken.
Not when the children’s footsteps faded upstairs.
Friedrich was away. But there was nothing improper about continuing to talk. No explicit rule was being broken. Jo clung to that as she sorted papers already sorted, as she lit a lamp she didn’t need, as she pretended not to notice that Laurie was watching her with no effort at concealment.
There was no desire in that look, she told herself.
Only attention.
Only care.
Only everything that desire imitates dangerously well.
Laurie moved slowly, obeying a silence that demanded caution. He stopped near her. Too near to be casual, not close enough to become a reproach.
Jo felt—and denied—the weight of his attention.
There was no desire in the air.
There was no urgency.
Until he stepped closer.
There was nothing… nothing that could be named without risk.
His voice was low. It didn’t tremble. But it carried a tone she knew all too well: that of truths that do not accept postponement.
“It’s no use, Jo,” he said. “We gotta have it out ”
And all the small lies, so carefully constructed, began to crack at once.