“I’m sure that your young fiancee would rather you attend to her needs at this moment,” I said to Luke Barlow later that day, after he had started tapping on the window of my closed shop. “Thank you for your kindness to my daughter, but you ought to go back to young Miss — well, I’m afraid I don’t presently remember what her name is.”

And I opened the door just enough to pass the box with the note back to him. Luke Barlow would not be giving my daughter money, not today, not ever. Though it pained me to pass up a possible source of support for my beloved Vivi, it pained me even more to think that I might be in the debt of her absent father.

Luke took this opportunity to open the door all the way and step inside the shop. He took the envelope from me, then held fast to my hand.

“I have broken off the engagement,” he said. “And I wanted to ask you to remain my wife. If you say no this time, I shall wait until our child is of age before troubling you again. But if you would have me, my dream would be for all of us to live together,” he said, looking steadily into my eyes as he proposed it.

I refused to hear of it. “You had one chance to live with me,” I told him. “You ordered me out of Woodshire, and I left carrying your child. That was your one chance, and no matter how many coins you may offer my daughter, it is not something you can win back with a few pretty words.”

He seemed so surprised that he let my hand drop.

“I told you that I did not wish you to be a prisoner,” he managed. “That is all that I said, Alice! Surely you did not take that as a dismissal? For I was hoping that you would stay, but knew that as a gentleman I could not force that.”

This made me blink. Luke Barlow had banished me! He could not claim that he was being “just a gentleman” when he let me endure exile from Woodshire.

But when I thought on his account, I realized that it was actually in keeping with the facts. As soon as he said that he could not require me to stay there, I had taken his words as a cruel dismissal. My perception of my love was tainted by the scandalous conduct of his mother, not to mention my poor opinion of the upper set.

And still, my suspicions lingered. “You did not come after me,” I said, my voice beginning to break.

“I did!” he said, drawing closer. “But I could not find you. I looked in every city, London most of all.”

And this, too, made sense to me. After all, I had been in London, hiding from the man.

When I looked up at him again, he knew my heart. And as he stepped forward to kiss me, I felt a desire completely unlike anything I had felt for anyone in the past weeks, even when the person I was rolling about with was Luke Barlow. At last, love came into my soul like a great blow, and after I kissed the man I began to cry.

I felt like my tears were foolish, but Luke was also crying. When he took out a handkerchief, he was plainly unsure of whether he should dry my tears first or see to his own, and as he hesitated we both began to laugh.

We then spent some moments just holding each other, and I felt the sort of deep calm that came to me when I had rocked Viviana as a baby. It was an instinctive sense that all would yet be well, no matter what had happened in the world, and I hoped that it would last forever.

It did not. Soon, my crying started once more.

When the tears came again, it was for reasons having to do with the circumstances of the reunion. “The scandal will be too great,” I groaned. “It would have been bad enough if we had gotten things right from the first, but now the damage to our reputations will cripple both of us.”

Holding me up, Luke smiled, then he reached into his pocket and showed me a document. It seemed quite impossible that any one piece of paper would be enough to make London society forget that the man had married in secret, separated from his bride for a decade, then tried to marry another woman, but I took a look at it anyway.

It contained something about four individuals, a ship, and a pair of dates. All of it was incomprehensible to me.

“I had already booked the passage,” he said. “You are right that weathering the scandal in London would be impossible. But in the New World, few will know and fewer still shall attach any importance to how I have squandered the first decade of our marriage. I hoped that you would go with me, though I did not dare ask until now.”

Shocked, I looked at the document. It was first class passage for four across the ocean. Luke would go with me, my mother, and our daughter to live there. And with his fortune and whatever I earned from selling the shop, we would be well set up for a new life there.

I looked back at him. “But will you not miss Woodshire?” I asked. “It is your ancestral home, after all.”

“My home is with you, Alice,” he whispered. “If you are sure that you will have me.”

I was sure. In fact, I knew that I would have him that very afternoon, and then again and again for years to come.

“Come,” I said, leading him up the stairs. “It is time that you met our daughter.”