Becoming Lailah: Married to my Twin Sister's Billionaire Husband

Chapter 364: Chapter 364: The Wedding Band 2

"What about it," he said.

"The small dining room," she said. "I want to eat there every night. Not the main one. The small one with the south field view."

He looked at her for a moment. "Done," he said, the same word he had used about the gardening book, delivered with the same complete absence of ceremony and the same absolute certainty of follow-through.

She settled deeper into the chair.

He turned back to the fire.

The cottage held them — the fire doing its work, the lighthouse doing its work, the sea outside making its loud November argument with the rocks.

She was aware, at the edges of her attention, that tomorrow Carson would appear from the pub with the fish and his opinions. The week after they would go back to the estate.

All of it waiting.

But right now she was in a low armchair beside a fire in a Welsh cottage watching the man she had married without expecting to marry, and the wedding band was on her finger, and outside the path to the water was still lit with fourteen lanterns.

He looked up from the fire and found her watching him and held her gaze for a moment with the expression that had no name and required none.

Then he turned back to the fire.

And somewhere in the cottage — she heard it a few minutes later, so quiet she almost missed it under the sound of the sea — the kettle began to boil.

He had put it on without asking.

She closed her eyes and smiled.

Morning arrived, the light through the cottage windows.

She lay still for a moment, aware of the weight of his arm across her before she was fully awake. He was already awake. He was always already awake. She could tell by the quality of the stillness.

She turned her head.

He was looking at the ceiling.

"Good morning," she said.

He turned his head and looked at her. The blue of his eyes first thing in the morning, before the day had organized itself around him, was the clearest version of it she had seen.

"Good morning," he said.

She held up her hand between them. The ring caught the morning light.

He looked at it. Then at her.

"Still real," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"I keep expecting it not to be."

He was quiet for a moment. "Why."

She thought about how to say it honestly. "Because I had prepared myself for a different timeline," she said. "I thought — I assumed — that you would need years. That whatever this was would be slow and difficult and that I would spend a long time waiting for you to be ready for something permanent." She looked at the ring. "I had accepted that version. I was fine with it."

"And this version."

"Is not what I planned for," she said. "Which doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It means I keep looking at it and finding it still there when I expected it to have been revised."

He was quiet for a long moment. His hand found hers between them — not dramatically, just his fingers covering the ring and her hand both, warm and unhurried.

"I’ve been running on revised timelines my entire existence," he said. "The exile wasn’t planned. The memory loss wasn’t planned. You weren’t planned." A pause. "At some point the plans become less useful than the thing in front of you."

She looked at him.

"The thing in front of you," she said.

"You," he said, with the flat directness of a man stating a coordinate. "Always. For some time now."

She pressed her lips together. Not to suppress a smile. Just because the feeling was large and the room was small and she needed a moment with it.

He turned his head back to the ceiling.

His hand stayed over hers.

Carson appeared at nine forty-seven.

Not at the door — at the garden gate, which he opened with the confident ease of someone who had decided that gates in his general vicinity were a courtesy rather than a boundary. He was carrying something wrapped in paper that smelled extraordinary, which meant he had either been to the village already or had somehow convinced the pub’s kitchen to wrap fish at this hour, both of which were plausible given Carson.

Grayson was in the garden.

He had gone out after breakfast with the coastal gardening book and the expression of a man who had something to assess, and Mailah had watched him from the kitchen window for ten minutes before deciding that this was simply going to be the morning and had made tea.

She was on the porch when Carson came through the gate.

He stopped when he saw her. He looked at her face. He looked at her hand.

Something happened to his expression — brief and unperformed, the layer underneath his theater surfacing for a moment before he recovered.

"The fish," he said, holding up the paper parcel. "Arthur was right about it."

"You’re here very early," she said.

"Quality control," he said, which was what he always said, and which had stopped meaning I’m inserting myself and had started meaning something more like I needed to see that you were alright.

She understood this. She did not say it.

"Come in," she said.

He came in.

Grayson appeared from the garden seven minutes later with mud on his boots and the book under his arm, took in the scene — Carson at the kitchen table with the unwrapped fish and an expression of studied nonchalance — and set the book on the counter with the resigned precision of a man who had correctly predicted this and had no energy to address it before tea.

"The gate," Grayson said.

"Was unlocked," Carson said.

"It’s always unlocked. That’s not the point."

"I brought fish," Carson said.

"I can see that."

"Arthur specifically recommended this vendor." He looked at Mailah. "He was right. I ate some on the way here."

"You ate the fish we were going to have for breakfast," Grayson said.

"I ate some of it," Carson said. "There’s still most of it." He looked at the parcel. "Probably."

Grayson looked at the parcel. Then at the ceiling. Then at Mailah with the expression of a man who had a brother and had been having this specific category of interaction for centuries and had not yet found a method of managing it that didn’t require more energy than he currently had available.

She handed him his tea.

He took it. "Thank you," he said, which he said every time, which was one of the things on her list.

Carson watched this exchange with the focused attention of someone collecting data.

"You said thank you," he said.

"I say thank you," Grayson said.

"You didn’t use to."

"I’ve updated the behavior."

Carson looked at Mailah again. Back at Grayson. At the ring on her hand where it rested on the counter. He had the expression of a man assembling a complete picture from available information and finding the picture considerably more affecting than he had expected.

He looked at the fish.

"I’ll cook it," he said. "Since I’m here."

"You’ll incinerate it," Grayson said.

"That’s rich, coming from the man who has a documented egg incident."

"The egg was a calibration issue."

"So will the fish be," Carson said, with cheerful certainty, and stood up and moved toward the hob with the confidence of someone who had never once been deterred by a previous outcome.

Grayson looked at Mailah.

She looked at Carson at the hob.

"Left burner," she said quietly.

"He won’t listen," Grayson said.

"I know," she said. "But at least we’ll have tried."

The fish survived, marginally.

Carson used the left burner despite being told about the left burner, claimed the result was intentional, and ate more than his share with the focused appreciation of someone who had been thinking about this fish since Arthur mentioned it two days ago.

They ate at the narrow counter — all three of them, the cottage not having been designed for this number of opinions at once — and the morning was loud in the particular way mornings were loud when Carson was present, which was to say it was loud with Carson and quiet underneath him in the way that two people who had reached a certain kind of understanding tended to be quiet around each other.

After, Carson washed the plates.

He did this without being asked, which was either a concession to the occasion or a bid for continued access to the fish supply, and neither Grayson nor Mailah questioned it because the result was the same either way.

When he finished he dried his hands and turned around and looked at Grayson with the unperformed expression.

"The lighthouse," he said. "I saw the lanterns yesterday morning."

"Yes," Grayson said.

"You did that."

"Yes."

Carson looked at his brother for a long moment. The expression of a man who had known someone for four centuries and was holding the accumulated weight of that knowing alongside something new that had been added to it.

"Fourteen," he said.

"Yes," Grayson said.

"Why fourteen specifically."

"The distance from the door to the flat shelf," Grayson said. "The spacing was determined by the visibility interval. If you place them further apart, there are gaps where the path is dark between one and the next." He said this with the practical directness of someone explaining a logistics decision. "Fourteen eliminated the gaps."

Carson absorbed this.

"Right," he said, in the tone he used when he had nothing further to add, which was rare enough to be noticeable.

He picked up his jacket. Looked at Mailah.

"Cerys will have something to say," he said.

"She always has something to say," Mailah agreed.

"She’ll be at the market tomorrow." He paused. "I may have mentioned to the landlord that there was something to celebrate. He may have had opinions about that."

Grayson looked at him. "What kind of opinions."

"The kind that involve the village having opinions," Carson said, with the expression of a man who had set something in motion and was not entirely certain of the radius.

"Carson," Grayson said.

"It’s a small village," Carson said. "They don’t have a lot of occasions. They seemed — genuinely pleased." He headed for the door. "The landlord’s wife apparently makes something for weddings. She’s been making it since yesterday." He opened the door. "I don’t know what it is. She wouldn’t say. But she seemed very certain about it."

He left.

The gate clicked behind him.

Grayson stood in the kitchen looking at the closed door with the expression of a man recalibrating the expected parameters of his immediate future.

"The village," he said.

"Knows," she said.

"Because Carson told the landlord."

"Because Carson told the landlord," she confirmed.

He was quiet for a moment. "The landlord’s wife makes something."

"Apparently."

"We don’t know what."

"We don’t know what," she agreed.

He looked at her. She looked back at him. The silence lasted approximately four seconds before something shifted in his expression.