“The truth is, I’m jealous.”

Dorothea’s hand tenses around her mug. That word brings her back to the opera, when her days were a balancing act of performances and countless overtures from arrogant nobles. The allure of a diva did wicked things to a weak man’s spirit, as she’d often learned the hard way. So many fools blinded by their entitlement—convinced she was theirs, that they could buy her love and keep her all to themselves. The truly deranged ones tried to steal her, and some had gotten dangerously close to succeeding.

But Sylvain isn’t like them; he doesn’t mean it that way. He isn’t delusional to think he owns a piece of her heart—she’d given it willingly, an equivalent exchange for part of his. It lives burrowed into her chest, keeping her warm on the nights she feels most alone.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “We aren’t…” He shakes his head. “I don’t have the right to ask you to give up the life you’ve chosen. I know you want to see as much of the world as you can.” Through the eyes of a commoner: free, in many a sense, not tied down by the obligations that would come with marrying someone like him.

He glances out the tavern window into the now empty town square, wistful. Hours ago there’d been a stage there, with Dorothea at its center, singing songs of folk heroes and fated paramores torn apart by war. “Those crowds really do love you,” he says. “And I can tell you love them right back.”

She smiles. “It’s rewarding work. Simple, and certainly not as vital as tilling a field or running a territory—but it goes a long way. Gives people more to live for than survival.” She takes a breath, thinking of all the places she’s been since she last passed through Gautier. The people she’s met from all walks of life, the beliefs and customs that give them purpose. “Sometimes it gets exhausting, or even dangerous—those are the days when I wish I was having tea in a lavish sitting room, or being waited on hand and foot by a coterie of house staff…”

“You know you can have it,” he says with a coy tilt of his head. “It’s there for whenever you’re ready.”

“That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?” she asks, circling back to his confession. “That I’ll never be ready. That you’ll lose me to whatever’s out there.” Jealousy aimed at the entire rest of the world, for being chosen over him.

Sylvain is quiet, his hand trembling. Dorothea has a similar fear: that she’ll lose this feeling they share now, this perfect sense of safety when he’s next to her. Love is her ideal, the one thing she’s never compromised on—and Sylvain’s love is so boundless that she’s still in the process of easing herself into it. If that goes away, what will be left? What could possibly replace it?

It’s not healthy, this compulsion she has to test him. To test herself, to see if absence really does make the heart grow fonder. After spending so much of their lives pretending to be someone else, they suffer from a dire need to know exactly what they’re getting. One day they’ll have to bite the bullet and admit they’ve always held the necessary information.

She slides her forearm along the bar’s finished wood counter, nudging the back of Sylvain’s hand. His fingers unfurl like flower petals, notching perfectly between the grooves of her own; she gives him a squeeze, and he returns it.

“I’m yours, Sylvain Gautier,” she says—softly, almost inaudible, like she has to handle the words with the utmost care or they’ll shatter. “No crowd will ever change that.”

He turns to her, leaning in and pressing his lips to her forehead, warm breath tickling her hairline. “I know,” he murmurs, in a tone far more suited to his bedroom, not a tavern. It’s almost enough to make her stay for good this time.