She was fidgeting with his collar; Elias might have smiled at it, but he was a little too focused on the conversation to manage doing anything else. Evangeline hadn’t mentioned knowing him – which was probably for the best, because it was best to tell her himself. Thistle might have remembered, then, the events of Evangeline’s earlier life, the rumours of the time – but Daff surely had no patience to spare for gossip, new or old.

“That’s alright,” Elias said, because they had bumped into each other eventually, regardless. “She’s... she was Evangeline Asperhand, back when we knew each other,” – and born to the upper class, to strict pureblood parents, to expectations she had not wanted and standards that he had certainly not met. Would Daff understand what he meant by knew her, without him needing to say that he had loved her? “A long time ago. I was – younger than you are,” he said, managing a wry smile at the fool he had been at twenty-one, or twenty-two. He had just found success, just found his feet, just been propelled upwards, unprepared, in society. And Eva had been rebellious, newly out of school and believing herself deserving of some, any, kind of freedom.

He watched Daff’s face, careful, for her reaction. “As you can probably tell,” by her being Evangeline Rowle; by his being here; by the obvious state of the world and the wildly disparate worlds they had lived in, “– it didn’t work out.”

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