Well, she wasn't wrong about that. Obviously she couldn't keep them in the house and risk her husband finding them. The best thing to do would have been for her to have burned them, but... Well. It wasn't as though people could always bring themselves to do what was best. Ben understood that. That was probably why she'd decided to give them to him, instead of Aldous or Roman. Aldous or Roman would have taken them, Ben was sure, because they loved her as much as he did, but they couldn't have understood. Neither of them would know how intoxicating it was to hold on to a little piece of who you had been, before you decided to give yourself up for someone else. They wouldn't have understood how much it hurt to lose the sliver of possibility that things could be different, even if you knew they weren't ever actually going to be. They wouldn't have understood how trapped you could feel by the littlest thing, like having to burn some letters to keep them from your spouse.

Ben understood. Not for the reasons that November would have thought, but he understood. Nova probably still thought he was acting a rake on purpose, trying to mess around behind Melody's back, because that was what he'd implied when they'd last talked about it. He wasn't — even after their last explosive fight, he still wasn't — but he knew that feeling anyway. Being trapped and feeling like all of the possibilities for the future were closing off one by one and there was nothing left except this.

"Alright," he agreed quietly, though his tone made it clear that he was no less miserable about the prospect of taking them. "They're safe with me, Nova."