Page 39 of The Number of Love
“Willa can fix it, I imagine. You enjoy your time with your brother.” She sent him a tight smile over Dot’s shoulder. “Sorry to have caused a ruckus.”
“Are you kidding?” His grin looked almost nearly without pain. “This is the most interesting thing to happen here in days. You’ve made yourself the heroine of the ward.”
With a shake of her head more amused than she’d thought it could be, Margot tucked the journal and the duchess’s card into her handbag and calculated how long it would take her to reach her brother’s house—and how many horrified looks she’d have to ignore on the walk.
12
Ignore your brother.”
Margot kept her gaze on the mirror, but she moved it from the reflection of Willa as she snipped at the back of her hair to Lukas, who stood glowering in the doorway. An image that might have looked more intimidating were Zurie not gurgling happily in his arms and smacking his cheeks with chubby hands.
“No, do not ignore me. I am only saying what everyone else will. Short hair on women is scandalous.”
Willa smiled as she worked. “He doesn’t mean that, because he knows well that I cut mine the year before he met me, and he would nevereverimply that I committed some grave social error in doing so.”
Lukas’s reflection frowned. “That was different. You cut yours so you could sell it and buy material to make your brother a coat. That was a selfless reason, not one made from frustration. Or fashion—not that Margot ever thinks of something as trivial as fashion.”
Snip. Snip.Willa cut hair in the same way she played the violin—with precise, well-planned movements. The tension in Margot’s shoulders eased. She would be even and symmetrical again in no time.
“You know how rebellious I am, luv. Keep saying how unbecoming it is, and I’m going to cut my own.”
Lukas’s reflection intercepted little Zurie’s hand, which made the baby giggle. His scowl only darkened. “Absolutely not. I forbid it.”
Margot’s gaze went to Willa in the mirror. Her sister-in-law only grinned at the command. “And why not? Will you not love me anymore if I have short hair?”
“That is not it, as well you know. But if you cut yours, then it would not be but a day before suddenly I was thinking that short hair was the loveliest style ever to come into fashion, and it is embarrassing to constantly be changing my opinions based on whatever you do. Spare a man his pride,mon amour. Take pity.”
Willa laughed. Lukas kissed the baby fist he held captive. Zurie squealed in delight.
Margot rolled her eyes. But with amusement. “It is only hair.” How many times would she have to say that? It was part of the reason why she’d not resorted to scissors since she was ten. “It will grow back, if I decide I want it to.”
“And in the meantime, you’ll look chic and on the cutting edge of fashion.” Willa laughed even as she said it, obviously anticipating the scowl Margot now directed at her reflection. “There, Lukas, I gave her a reason to grow it back out. See what a good wife I am?”
A buzz sounded from the hallway, and Lukas spun out of the door. “That will be your sisters, I imagine. I will let them in.”
“I don’t know why I did it.” Margot said the words quietly, almost changing her mind about saying them at all. But that was the truth that had settled as she walked here. She wasn’t usually so impulsive, especially not about something a stranger said. It didn’t matter. It could have no effect on her life what some random woman in a hospital thought of her. But she had let it—she hadmadeit affect her by reacting as she had done.
She didn’t care about the hair. It would grow, or it would not, if she decided she liked it this way. She’d cut it before. She was hardly like one of those girls who thought they wanted to be fashionable and then bawled their way out of the barbershop.
But the irrational action—that bothered her.
Willa put the scissors down and leaned over until her head wasnext to Margot’s, their faces sharing the reflection. They looked nothing alike—Willa’s hair was a fair brown, straight and silky, her nose flatter, her complexion that perfect English rose—but they were sisters. Love and Lukas had made them so, and it was the only reason Margot entrusted her with such an unsettling truth.
It was why she made no objections when Willa slid an arm around her shoulders. This sister of hers wasn’t much of a toucher. Only with those she loved best, and only in moments when it mattered. When Willa put her arm around her, Margot knew it meant something.
In many ways, they spoke the same language.
“Margot. I know you think it’s weak to give in to emotions. But you just lost your mother. That can’t go unanswered by your heart.”
“It hasn’t.” It wouldn’t. She would discover what had really made her mother fall and breathe her last. She would go over every minute of her last days until she had answers.
“It has. This isn’t something you approach scientifically, as a puzzle needing to be solved. This isn’t a matter for your head.” She lifted her fingers and rested them against the side of Margot’s head.
Margot drew in a breath. “Everything is a matter for the head. The mind controls the heart—or can. We do nothaveto be swayed by every emotion that comes along.”
“No. Not each one. But sometimes they crash over us, don’t they? Too strong for us to swim against, to fight off. And then we do illogical things like cut our hair off in the middle of a hospital corridor. Or go with someone into occupied territory to rescue his mother and sister.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Worse, she couldn’t hold Willa’s reflected blue-green gaze. She looked down, even though she could count on one hand the times she’d ever been the first to avert her eyes in a conversation.
