Where the Light Falls Gold

Paris in autumn has a particular quality of light - generous and unhurried, the kind that makes ordinary things look like they were always meant to be beautiful.

Annabelle Ashworth arrives in October of 1873 with her composure intact and her expectations carefully managed. She is the second daughter of a respectable English family - warm, capable, loved by everyone who knows her - and she has spent nineteen years becoming very good at taking up exactly the right amount of space. Not too much. Never too much.

Crown Prince Francis is not what she expected.

This is the first problem.

The second is that he notices her in the particular way of someone who is not going to stop noticing. He is patient about it. He shows up at her door with a book and a bad excuse and comes back on Thursday and learns the real laugh and the folding habit and all the true things she says when she forgets to be careful - and she finds, slowly and then completely, that she has let him in.

What grows between them is not a grand thing. It is a quiet thing. Tuesday evenings, lamplight, and honest conversations in the dark. The most real thing either of them has ever had.