He startled slightly when Daff started moving, getting out of her armchair; he could only watch, a breath stilled in his throat. She came towards him, and sat on the sofa instead. She was close enough to touch now: Elias could reach up for her hand, if he liked. There was room beside her – it might have been an invitation.

He might not have taken it but for the way she looked so sad, something abruptly welling in her eyes – so he shifted upwards, sinking into the space beside her, and draping on arm along the back of it so that he was facing Daffy, and so that she had more room.

And Daff’s counters made him want to protest, like they always did – but this time Elias bit his tongue and let her say them. He hadn’t much wanted to listen to her last time, so perhaps it was overdue. It still hadn’t been all her fault – he knew he’d overreacted, hadn’t forgiven her as he should. It had hurt him, though. He couldn’t bring himself to say that out loud, but it had bruised his feelings. “I forgive you,” he said – deliberately, slow and clear – “but I know it wasn’t all your fault, either.” She had not written the first letter, and hadn’t done anything actually wrong; he should not have expected easy happiness at her finding out she was pregnant, either.

“And I wish I could have – just trusted you, and what you said,” he added, biting on his bottom lip as he tried to figure out how to word it, the doubts that had been gnawing at him in the last few months. “It just – felt like you weren’t happy, that you might have regretted it all. Getting married.” And after all the time they had spent wanting and waiting to marry, the thought that it could have been a mistake had been hard to swallow. But she wanted to fix it – she thought it was worth fixing – so he would try to believe it this time, and do better by Daffy now too.

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