Arabella's POV
I went to the cottage alone.
I hadn't been there in three weeks—not since the night Damian brought me dinner and I sat on his lap and pressed my forehead against his and told him I didn't know what I felt. The words had been true then. They were still true now. But I was getting closer to an answer, and I needed quiet to find it.
The cottage was exactly as I remembered it from childhood photographs. Stone walls. Climbing roses. A little stone path that led toward the sea. My mother had described it to me a hundred times when I was small—the creak of the wooden floorboards, the way the light came through the kitchen window in the morning, the sound of the waves against the cliffs at night. She'd promised to bring me here someday, when things were better, when my grandfath
