Morandi realized that it had been easier to be wrong. To be right about having been wrong. Sitting here with proof of the impossible by his side – pressed warmly, comfortably against his shoulder, a very different sort of weight from ten years ago – was much more difficult. Not knowing what he felt, but feeling it anyway – was much, much more difficult.
But there was something terribly mundane about the embarrassment he felt when she spoke again, and he turned his head just a little to see that soft fond smile on her face. Of course she remembered, he thought, chagrinned. She remembered a great deal of things.
Shadow stirred behind them, grunting. There was already dog hair on the lovely quilt, no doubt. Pup was properly dry now, and had that ridiculous puffed look of recently-bathed dogs.
To sentimental he was not sure he could argue; his life rather depended upon her sentimentality. And nursery magic was something he had wished more than once existed, for all the good it might have done them.
It was what she said next that struck him to his very heart. His eyes widened slightly, and he looked down and away, the lump in his throat now impossible to swallow, though he tried.
“Yes,” he said haltingly, harsh with the difficulty of speaking. He drew in another deep breath, reminding himself of his training; he straightened, though he did not lean away. “Love is – indeed – most painful.”
And what would you know of love, Inspector? It is hardly as if you have ever felt it.
There was a small, brisk smile on his face when he looked over and down at her, lifting his brows. “You have not changed your mind about that, then,” he said, his voice even. He supposed she had not had much opportunity to, although he wondered now what she knew of love. Looking at her now and thinking just how little he knew, it was a very strange thought.
“I did not, I recall – ah – appreciate the sentiment, in which… parting… seemed a necessity,” he said, glancing back toward the window. Of course, it might not have been the best story to read to a silly, sentimental boy on his sickbed; retrospectively, the parts about disinfecting and burning all of one’s possessions might have struck him somewhat ghoulishly. “Most of the stories about love were so, were they not?”
Blockhead Hans not included, he supposed, turning another few pages. But he had a firm, well-worn feeling that was not the sort of story which Aurelie meant.