“Yes, yes, the Church frowns on birth control,” he said without much conviction. Children starving in this world and the bigwig bishops still wrung their old liver-spotted hands about contraception and family planning—nonsense. Absolute nonsense. When it came to sins, he had bigger fish to fry.
“So you don’t want children,” he said with a shrug. “That’s fine. I don’t have any children myself. Not for me. Not for you. What is it then? You said you covet your neighbor’s wife. Is it because Marcus and Grace made love?”
There it was, that laugh again. Big laugh. Beautiful laugh. He hadn’t known he’d made a joke but apparently he had.
“That’s another no,” she said once she stopped laughing. “I do not feel any jealously because they slept together one time on one night. If you knew how many men—and women—I’d been with in my life…”
“Ballpark? You’re not the only nosy one in the room.”
“More than fifty. Less than a hundred,” she said. “Not counting clients.”
“Quite a ballpark you have there.”
“Whereas he’s slept with four people in his entire life. Four.”
“Those four meant something to him. Did your ballpark?”
“Of course. I don’t have casual sex.”
“You know what I mean. You weren’t in love with everyone you’ve been with?”
“No. And neither was he in love with his four. So it isn’t jealousy. We don’t do jealously like vanilla people. When I think about S?ren with Kingsley, it’s arousing. Two beautiful men together? There isn’t anything not sexy about that. They love each other and I love them both. Same with Grace. Grace is a beautiful woman, inside and out, and one of my dearest friends. She’s the wife of a man I love more than I’m comfortable admitting to anyone but you.” Her eyes flashed again, changed color, and it seemed she was remembering something both dark and beautiful. He wished he could see into her mind. What a show that would be…
“And Grace,” Eleanor continued. “She loves S?ren the way he deserves to be loved—unreservedly and with full faith in him. I couldn’t have picked a better woman to be the mother of his child. But even knowing that, believing that, and loving her and loving him and—on top of all that—loving Fionn more than I thought was possible to love a child who isn’t your own…there’s still this thing, here.” She tapped her chest over her hidden heart. “And I don’t know what it is other than it hurts. So I know there’s a sin in there somewhere.”
“A lot of things hurt that aren’t sins. Longing isn’t a sin. Regret isn’t a sin. Hope isn’t a sin. They all hurt.”
“It’s not any of those. So what is it?” She rubbed her temples and looked tired—tired but lovely. It hurt his heart to see it.
“Tell me when you feel it the most, dear. Tell me when you first felt that…” He tapped his own chest. “That ache right there.”
She sighed and leaned forward in her chair, crossing her legs at the ankles. She looked so elegant, so much like a lady. Was this really Marcus’s Eleanor? The teenaged car thief who’d made off with his heart twenty-three years ago? She looked more like a duchess than a car thief.
“Ah, fuck it,” she said, leaning back in the chair again. She threw one leg over the chair arm and threw her arm over her eyes to hide from him.
All right. So it was that Eleanor.
“Eleanor. Talk to me.”
“He’s going to kill me for telling you this.”
“He won’t ever know you told me.”
“You promise?”
“I swear. I’m an old man with no reason to lie. I’ll guard your secret with my life.”
She groaned or maybe it wasn’t a groan. Maybe it was a growl. You must drive him mad, Stuart thought. You must make him wild for you. You are a teenage girl in a woman’s body with a woman’s needs and a teenage girl’s savage heart.
If he were forty years younger…
“I found a picture,” she said at last. “I didn’t mean to find it. I wasn’t looking for it. I just found it. Last week.”
“This all started last week?”
“Yes.”
“Because you found a photograph?”
Behind the arm draped over her eyes she nodded.
“Where did you find it?” Ballard asked.
“In his old Bible. He keeps private things in it—love notes from Kingsley from their high school days, the bookmark I made him once, the list of questions I wrote for him when I was 16 that he promised to answer for me one day… All his most special secrets he keeps in this Bible. He left it at my house one night, and I flipped through it for no other reason than plain heathen nosiness. Is nosiness a sin?”
“Venial.”
“Shit.”
“Keep talking. You found the photograph in his Bible?”
“I did. Of her.”
“Of Grace.”
“Yes. Of Grace holding Fionn. As a baby. He’s a toddler now, but he was a baby in the picture. And on the back of the photograph Grace had written the date and a short message.”
“What did it say?”
“Grace wrote, S?ren, Here’s the picture you asked for. It’s in black and white because I’m blushing so much. All our love, Your Grace and Fionn.”
“Is that what bothered you? That she called herself his Grace?”