Chapter 17: Old Rooms

Ambrose's POV

Our rooms had been aired, and aired badly.

They smelled of Ottoline's lavender, and I opened every window.

June had tasted the water and the bread.

Then she had gone across the corridor to sleep in a chair outside my mother's door.

My mother.

I had said the word to myself all day, and it still didn't fit in my mouth.

Linnea stood at the foot of our bed and watched me walk the walls.

I had slept alone in that bed for nine months.

"You're doing it again," she said.

"What?"

"Checking the corners."

"There was a copy of my seal in that woman's desk," I said. "I don't know what else she copied."

"Ambrose."

"I don't know what's real in this house. I don't know what was ever mine."

She crossed the carpet in her bare feet and took my face in both hands.

"I'm real," she said. "They're real. Come here."

I had kept myself in order for thirty-four years.

I had kept it through the crown and the court and nine months in the cold.

I had kept it through a day of learning my whole life was a file.

It went in one breath.

I kissed her hard enough to push her back against the bedpost.

She gasped into my mouth and pulled my jacket off my shoulders, and I heard something tear and did not care.

"There he is," she whispered.

"Say it again."

"There he is, my husband. Take that off."

I pulled my shirt over my head.

She tugged her sweater off, and then the rest.

She stood in front of me in the lamplight with both hands over her rounded stomach.

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