Five years, Sebastian had discovered, could alter nearly everything while passing with indecent speed.

The sea at Brighton rolled in bright bands beneath a clear summer sky, its edges tipped with white where children insisted on challenging waves too large for them and mothers insisted on challenging the children. Wind salted the air, tugged at ribbons, hats, tempers, and any object insufficiently committed to remaining where it had been placed.

Sebastian stood upon the sand with his boots already ruined and considered himself a fortunate man.

Not because of the weather, which was tolerable at best. Not because of the fashionable crowds parading the shore, which remained society with sand added. Not even because the physicians claimed sea air cured half the ailments England invented.

He was fortunate because his wife was laughing.

Evelina stood some yards away with her skirts pinned up, hair escaping artfully from arrangements that had long since surrendered to the breeze. She held Beatrice upon one hip while directing the others with the calm authority of a benevolent queen.

Their children were, naturally, twins.

Both sets of them.

Their eldest pair, Charles and Francesca, had only recently turned four and were now engaged in the construction of a sand fortress doomed equally by poor engineering and the incoming tide. The younger pair, Edmund and Beatrice, newly two and already possessed of opinions far larger than themselves, moved between helpfulness and sabotage with admirable speed. Edmund had discovered a shell and considered it treasure of national importance. Beatrice, from the security of her mother’s arms, issued commands no one obeyed.

When their first son and daughter had arrived together, Sebastian had considered Providence whimsical. When, two years later, another son and daughter followed in matching indignation, he concluded Providence was openly amused.

“Papa!”

He turned in time to catch a damp handful of seaweed thrown by Edmund with impressive malice and poor aim.

“An act of war,” Sebastian observed.

“It is treasure,” Edmund declared.

“It is algae.”

“It is treasure.”

“Then keep it.”

The child considered this injustice profound.

Across the beach, Jasper Wentworth was attempting to rescue his own youngest from a determined tide while Felicity laughed without offering assistance. They had three children in five years and all the air of a household perpetually one minute from glorious collapse.

Jasper caught Sebastian’s eye and called, “You might help.”

“You married courageously,” Sebastian replied. “Manage it bravely.”

Felicity applauded this from beneath her parasol.

Some friendships, Sebastian reflected, only improved when subjected to matrimony.

By late afternoon, the expedition retreated inland to Richmond House, his Brighton residence overlooking lawns that sloped toward the sea. The place had once felt merely handsome. Now it felt inhabited.

Carriages already crowded the drive. Relations had descended in force.

The dowager duchess arrived first in every setting, though never by schedule. Lady Montague arrived next with practical concerns and enough shawls to clothe a village. Sir Edmund came carrying gifts that children would break within hours. Georgiana and her husband followed with their growing brood and opinions already unpacked.

Arabella came last.

She was seven months with child, married now to Mr. Henry Ashcombe, a gentleman of good sense, comfortable means, and the rare gift of not being impressed by beauty when employed as weaponry. Under his steady regard, Arabella had softened where no reproach ever moved her. Vanity remained—Sebastian doubted death itself could remove it entirely—but kindness had found purchase beside it.

She had asked Evelina’s forgiveness two years earlier with tears real enough to surprise everyone, most especially herself.

Now she descended carefully from the carriage, one hand at the small of her back, and announced before anyone could greet her, “If one more person tells me pregnancy is a blessing, I shall strike them.”

“Still charming,” Evelina murmured.

“Still smug,” Arabella replied, then embraced her sister warmly.

Peace, Sebastian had learned, often arrived wearing sarcasm.

Even Charlotte attended for a portion of the week.

Lady Charlotte—now Marchioness Halden—had married a man with a title, fortune, and a mutual preference for parallel lives. It was not a love match, but neither was it misery. She remained elegant, clever, and faintly dissatisfied with the universe. Yet she treated Evelina with courtesy too consistent to be called performance.

Growth, too, sometimes wore expensive silk.

By evening, the children were fed, bathed, threatened, negotiated with, and at last surrendered to bed. Nurses withdrew victorious. The house exhaled.

Tables had been laid upon the terrace beneath lantern light. Summer dusk lingered blue at the edges of the gardens. Crystal glimmered. Silver shone. Voices overlapped in cheerful disorder.

Sebastian sat beside Evelina while four sets of parents debated the proper age for pony ownership, Jasper defended an obviously guilty son, Felicity laughed into her wine, and Arabella informed Henry that if he repeated one more childbirth anecdote from his mother, she would return to London alone.

He had once believed happiness must arrive grandly to count, announced by triumph, transformed by spectacle, unmistakable in its scale.

Instead, it had come like this: in noise and overlapping voices, in warm bread passed hand to hand before the butter cooled, in a child’s forgotten shoe beneath a chair, in laughter rising from one end of the table and answered at the other, in his wife’s shoulder brushing his as she reached for her glass.

It had come in the ordinary abundance of being loved and surrounded.

Evelina turned to him midway through Sir Edmund’s story about a goose and whispered, “If you do not rescue me, I shall be forced to hear the ending.”

“You know the ending.”

“It changes each year.”

“Then we must escape at once.”

Later, when dessert had been praised and neglected equally, they slipped away unnoticed except by Felicity, who saw everything and only winked.

They walked down the moonlit path toward the lower gardens where lavender breathed sweetness into the warm night. The sea sounded faintly beyond the trees, steady as breath.

For a time, neither spoke, though their hands found one another by habit. Moonlight silvered her profile, touched the lines maturity had only refined, and caught the ring he still sometimes stared at without reason.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

She laughed softly. “After five years, you still ask?”

“After five years, I ask with greater interest.”

She leaned her head briefly against his shoulder as they walked.

“I am absurdly happy,” she said. “Which would have offended the younger version of me terribly.”

“She was wrong about many things.”

“She was frightened.”

“Yes.”

“And you?” she asked. “Are you happy?”

He considered the question with proper seriousness.

Inside the house behind them waited children, family, chaos, affection, interruption, and tomorrow’s certain demands.

Beside him walked the woman who had remade every room he entered simply by being in it.

“Yes,” he said. “Though the word remains inadequate.”

She smiled. “That sounds familiar.”

“It was stolen from an excellent source.”

They stopped where the path opened to a view of the sea, and moonlight lay broad and bright across the water.

He touched her face with the same care he had used the first time in a dawn garden years ago. Then he kissed her.

There was nothing hurried in it now. No uncertainty. No wonder at being allowed. Only depth, warmth, memory, and the quiet astonishment that love, once begun, could continue widening.

When they parted, she remained close, smiling against his mouth.

“Do you know,” she said, “I nearly refused you forever.”

“I know.”

“You ought to thank Georgiana.”

“I thank her annually.”

“You ought to thank me.”

“For what?”

“For recovering my senses.”

He kissed her again for arrogance.

When he drew back, her smile softened slightly. “I did not think myself unworthy of you,” she admitted quietly. “Not exactly.”

His expression changed at once, attention sharpening.

“I simply …” She gave a small shake of her head. “I had been overlooked for so long that being seen at all felt improbable. To be loved so deliberately seemed almost impossible.”

Something passed through his face then, tender enough to ache. He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss against her knuckles. “You were never difficult to see.”

From the terrace came a child’s cry, followed by Jasper shouting, “That one is yours!”

Sebastian briefly closed his eyes.

“Reality returns.”

Evelina laughed and tugged his hand.

“Come, Your Grace. Let us go be fortunate.”