“I didn’t know what to expect when I found you again…if I found you again. I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”

“Wouldn’t remember a half-drowned nun I found on the beach? I wasn’t that drunk,” Jonathan objected.

Madeleine sighed. “Sorry. I just didn’t think what happened would affect you like it did me.” Definitely not to the point where he’d sober up and take in a lost daughter. Madeleine would not look at Hæra again. Not when that long body lounged so alluringly in the chair. “Did you see something? I don’t remember all the events of that night.”

At that, Hæra’s gaze snapped onto Madeleine like teeth. “You don’t?”

“I had a head injury,” Madeleine reminded her. Why had Hæra made it sound like an accusation? “A lot is fuzzy.”

“How much do you remember?” Hæra asked, her voice surprisingly sharp.

A perfect, naked woman’s body pressed against my own. A kiss like fire.

“It’s surprisingly vague,” Madeleine mumbled, her cheeks hot. “I woke up on the shore and thought a woman was with me. Then she was gone, and Jonathan showed up.”

“That’s it?” Hæra sounded disbelieving. “That’s all you remember?”

Why was Hæra looking at her like that?

Surprisingly vague? No joke. Madeleine only remembered waking up on the shore with a woman who’d then left her behind? Nothing else? That couldn’t be all. Why would Madeleine have come all this way for a memory so incomplete?

“What did the woman look like?” Hæra demanded, then wished she hadn’t. Talk about a risky question. If Madeleine said, Come to think of it, she looked like you, they could head into territory they weren’t yet ready for.

“I didn’t get a good look at her,” Madeleine said. “It was dark, and my head hurt. She looked more like a silhouette than anything.”

She sounded a little defensive. Hæra was better than she’d been before at reading those cues, just as she was better at reading books. Best to back down for now. “I see. That makes sense.”

“Does it?” Madeleine looked down at her breakfast and pushed around the black pudding patty with her fork. “I don’t feel like any of this makes sense. Jonathan, back to my original question…”

Jonathan shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable. “Why’d it affect me so much, ah, yes.” He glanced at Hæra, as if seeking something, but she had no idea what it was. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

He meant it literally, Hæra realized. Jonathan didn’t know what, or how much, to say. He wouldn’t give up her secret, their secret, until Hæra gave him the go-ahead.

She wasn’t ready to do that yet, and she gave him a minute shake of her head.