Archive of Our Own ^beta

Penelope, Age 9

Colin, Age 11

Penelope Featherington loved with the recklessness only children are allowed.

She had met Colin Bridgerton in the schoolyard the year before on a drizzly Tuesday when her shoelaces were soaked and untied. Her lunch had fallen jelly-side down on the pavement, her hands scraped raw from slipping in the mud. And while others laughed, Colin had crouched beside her, rainwater dripping off curls, and quietly offered her half of his sandwich without a word. After that, they became something unspoken. Not best friends because Eloise held that title later in life but something softer. Something unnamed and gentle and private that existed between giggles over sandwiches, shared crayons, and books.

Colin didn’t tease her like the others. Not about her freckles. Not about the way she read ahead in every class. Not even about the time she threw up during assembly from nerves. When she cried once, quietly behind the library shelves after Charlotte Wells said her dad was "a nobody with no money," Colin sat beside her, legs criss-crossed, and offered her a jelly bean from his pocket. He didn’t say anything then either, just bumped his shoulder against hers until she smiled again.

And Penelope didn’t mind when he wandered off mid-sentence to chase a butterfly or narrate a daydream about living in the jungle with only a spoon and a monkey for company. She liked his chaos. He liked her calm. They just simply fit.

Penelope was never part of the main playground crowd. Her mother always said she shouldn’t hover too much around the Bridgertons because though they’re polite enough, they’re still so dreadfully above their station. But Penelope never listened because the Bridgertons never made her feel small. Especially not Colin. He shared his biscuits and waited for her when she lagged behind in wellies two sizes too big. He made space for her. And in turn, she made a quiet home in her chest for him.

There were no promises made. No pinky swears. But somewhere in between trading Pokemon stickers and watching clouds from the top of the climbing frame in school, Penelope decided she loved him. The bright, unguarded sort of love that only children can carry. It was terrifying and far too much for her small heart but she carried it anyway.

That summer, the Featheringtons were invited over to the Bridgertons' family estate in Aubrey Hall for a barbecue. It was the kind of day Penelope had dreamed about all week, maybe all year. The sun had made a rare and glorious appearance stretching golden over the gardens.. The scent of roasted vegetables and spiced sausages wafted through the hedges, mingling with the smoke from the grill and the sharp tang of lemonade. 

Penelope had spent the morning nervously braiding her own hair in her bedroom mirror, fingers fumbling as she tried to tame the ginger frizz that always went wild in heat. She’d practiced how to say “thank you” without sounding too eager, how to smile like it wasn’t the best thing in the world to be asked. She didn’t get invited to many things.

Her mother had told her not to stain her sundress, not to talk too much, not to second serve herself dessert even if offered. Portia’s words were always rules wrapped in roses but Penelope didn’t care. Not when she saw the Bridgertons laughing in a swarm near the picnic tables and not when Colin grinned at her like she belonged there.

It had been a mostly happy day. Until she saw Colin storming away from the main lawn, hands shoved deep into his pockets, his curls flattened with sweat and frustration. His face was red and his eyes were wet in a way he tried to hide behind boyish bravado. She’d overheard a bit from Anthony and Benedict earlier. It was something about how Colin “ran like a duck” during football, how he’d missed a pass and tripped over his shoelace. 

When she caught up to him behind the big sycamore tree, he just shrugged. “They’re dumb,” he muttered. “Doesn’t matter.” But she could tell it did. She could always tell when he was hurting.

He disappeared soon after that. She noticed because the party didn’t feel quite as bright without him. So while the adults sipped Pimm’s and the other children threw water balloons near the fountain, Penelope wandered off in search of him.

The Bridgerton treehouse sat halfway up a stubborn old oak tree at the edge of their sprawling garden, tucked behind a curtain of ivy and years of childhood secrets. It was built when Anthony was ten, reinforced by Benedict’s sketchbook plans, and mostly ruled now by Colin and, soon, Gregory though everyone had once left a mark on its wooden walls. It wasn’t exactly allowed for guests, but Penelope had never been good at listening when it came to people she cared about.

She climbed it clumsily, scraping her knee on the rough bark halfway up. When she reached the top, Colin was curled up against the far wall, pretending to read a comic book, but his shoulders were tight. He didn’t look up until she entered the space with a soft “Hi.” 

“You found me,” he mumbled.

“You’re not very good at hiding,” she said, settling beside him on the floor. Her dress caught on a splinter, but she didn’t care.

He didn’t speak again for a while. They just sat, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the muffled sounds of the party far beyond the garden. The treehouse smelled like moss and old crayons and summer. Like childhood, sealed in wood.

“I brought something,” she added, like it was a peace offering. From her pocket, she pulled out a Twix bar, now melted from the sun and her nervous grip. “It’s kind of ruined, but it’s still good. We can split it.”

Colin blinked, wary at first, but then softened. “Thanks,” he murmured, taking his half, fingers brushing hers.

Penelope watched him a beat longer, heart thudding too loud in her chest. Then, with the same gravity one might use to make a wish, she said, “I think I love you.”

She said it simply. It wasn’t a question or a demand. Just something she needed to give away before it got too heavy to carry. Not as something she expected to be returned, but as something she needed to give.

Colin looked at her then really looked at her. His nose was still pink from the sun, and his curls were a tangle of leaves and wind. Then, he laughed. Not in a cruel way but just confused. The way only boys who hadn’t yet learned to hold feelings carefully could laugh.

“It will pass,” he shrugged, before popping the candy into his mouth.

Penelope smiled, trying not to feel the sting behind her eyes. She looked out over the yard, legs dangling off the edge of the treehouse, trying to pretend her heart hadn’t cracked just a little.

“It won’t,” she whispered to herself.

But Colin didn’t hear her. Or maybe he did, and just didn’t know what to do with it.

And that was the first time she said it.

Penelope, Age 12 

Colin, Age 14

By now, everyone knew Penelope Featherington was practically a Bridgerton.

She and Eloise were inseparable. They wore matching backpacks and had inside jokes no one else understood. They had an alarming knack for quoting Mean GIrls at the worst possible times. Teachers often said their names in one breath, as if they were a two-for-one deal. If Eloise was on a field trip, Penelope would still get called for attendance. If Penelope forgot her lunch, a Bridgerton sibling, usually Colin, somehow always had extra.

So yes, she was technically a Featherington. But in the eyes of half the school, Penelope was Bridgerton-adjacent by proxy. And for the most part, she didn’t mind because it gave her a place to belong.

Especially when it came to Colin.

He was now more confident and always had a mischievous spark in his eye. He made teachers and classmates laugh in class and snuck sweets into assemblies. He has gotten away with things he shouldn't and could charm answers out of anyone. 

He always gave her a wink when their paths crossed in the hallway. He wasn’t the loudest Bridgerton, that was Anthony. He wasn’t the most aloof, that was Benedict. But Colin was the one Penelope always noticed first. Because didn’t look at her like she was just Eloise’s shadow. He didn’t overlook her the way most older kids did. No, Colin saw her. Like she was a whole person and that her thoughts mattered.

She tried not to read too much into it. But she was twelve. And twelve is old enough to memorize how someone’s smile looks when it’s just for you. Old enough to wonder what it would be like to hold hands in the middle of a field trip, to have someone save you a seat not because they had to but because they wanted to.

And then she noticed everything.

Like how he stopped picking the crust off his sandwiches. How he started wearing cologne in small, almost undetectable amounts that she noticed before anyone else. How his voice dropped just slightly over the summer, going from playful and boyish to something steadier, deeper. Still Colin, but different.

She noticed the way he walked with longer strides, more confident. How the girls in Year 9 giggled too loudly when he passed. How he never seemed to notice but always remembered to greet her when they crossed paths

It was maddening, confusing, and exhilarating.

And because she was twelve, and twelve is an age where everything feels urgent and too much, she did what any pre-teen girl with poor impulse control and a love of scented gel pens would do.

She wrote him a note.

Folded tight into a perfect triangle, slipped into his locker after morning assembly, her heart hammering like it might tear straight through her uniform blouse. The note was unmistakably spritzed with her mother’s floral perfume. A rookie mistake, as Eloise would later declare when she found out.

The note read:

I think I love you. 

Not like cartoons or Romeo & Juliet, but real. 

Please don’t laugh.

She spent the entire day alternating between pretending it hadn’t happened and rehearsing the dozen ways he might respond. Maybe he’d smile. Maybe he’d blush and tell her he felt the same. Maybe he’d fold a note back into the same shape and pass it to her under their lunch table.

Instead, he got into a fight.

It happened near the vending machines, behind the Year 8 corridor where the teachers rarely patrolled before lunch. Fife, a gangly, mean-spirited student who was determined to make other people feel small, had cornered Penelope teasing her about her cardigan and calling her “Mrs. Bridgerton” in a mocking sing-song voice. He snatched her notebook, flipping through her doodles with a smug smirk. He saw sketches of hearts, tiny Colin initials, and one unfortunate attempt at drawing their initials inside a daisy chain before threatening to post them on the school portal.

She was frozen, half in horror, half in rage, when Colin appeared.

“Give it back,” he said sharply, eyes narrowed in a way Penelope had never seen before.

Fife laughed. “What are you, her bodyguard?”

Colin didn’t hesitate. “No. I’m her friend.” And then, without waiting for another word, he punched Fife in the shoulder hard, and fast. Fife stumbled backwards, crashing into the vending machine, and dropped her notebook with a yelp. A teacher rounded the corner seconds later. Fife ran. Colin got a warning.

Penelope could barely breathe.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said once it was just the two of them again, her voice wobbling.

He shrugged, rubbing his knuckles. “Yes, I did.”

She stared at him eyes wide, heart cartwheeling in her chest but she didn’t know what to say. So she smiled and picked up her notebook with trembling fingers.

That afternoon, he caught up with her outside the music room. The hallway was mostly quiet, echoing with the muffled sound of a cello warming up inside like someone practicing arpeggios with trembling fingers, as if the music itself was nervous.

He didn’t look angry anymore. Just…uncertain.

“You wrote the note?” he asked.

Penelope nodded, heartbeat loud in her ears. She was going to be sick. Or faint. Or maybe both.

He scratched the back of his neck, shifting on his feet like they suddenly didn’t fit right. “Pen… you don’t mean it.”

She blinked. “I do.”

“No,” he said gently. “You think you do. But it’ll pass.”

He said it so kindly and somehow that made it worse.

Penelope nodded again because what else was she supposed to do? Argue? Cry? 

She waited until he was gone to let the tears fall. Then she gripped the stairwell railing, blinking furiously as she made her way down without tripping, her vision blurring with each step. When she got home, she went straight to her room and sobbed into her pillow until her nose bled.

She didn’t tell Eloise this time.

Some heartbreaks are too soft and sacred for sharing.

Some secrets are meant to stay hers.

Penelope, Age 14

Colin, Age 16

By sixteen, Colin Bridgerton wasn’t just popular, he was Bridgerton popular.

It was legacy. Anthony had been a legend. He was captain of the football team, head boy, and the kind of student who teachers remembered fondly even after he caused chaos. Benedict followed with the same effortless charm and artistic flair. He doodled during assemblies and somehow won three national art competitions. He smiled with this crooked smile that made entire rows of students swoon.

Colin inherited both their reputations. The Bridgerton grin, the easy charisma, the soft power that meant he never waited in line for the canteen or got marked tardy even when he clearly was. He was the kind of popular that didn’t need effort. He made teachers laugh without trying. He made friends just by sitting next to someone. Girls adored him. He floated through hallways like gravity didn’t apply to him.

And yet, even as his orbit expanded, he never forgot Penelope Featherington.

They didn’t talk every day anymore, not like they used to. Somewhere between growing up and growing apart, the daily constancy of their childhood had shifted. They had different classes, different circles, different versions of the same world.

But he always made sure she was invited. To Bridgerton birthdays. To movie nights where Eloise would commandeer the remote. To parties in dimly lit basements with sticky floors and bodies pressed too close, or in someone’s overpolished townhouse where the music throbbed and the adults were suspiciously absent.

Penelope always came with Eloise. And sometimes with her heart in her throat. Because she knew she didn’t belong in those parties the way the other girls did. She wore secondhand dresses from her older sisters and a cardigan she never took off. Her makeup was minimal, more “barely there” than “cool girl.” But she still came. Sometimes, she and Eloise left early. Sometimes, they stayed longer than they meant to because Colin would flash them a grin across the room and wave like they were the most important people there.

It made other girls whisper. Penelope heard them always. The way they lingered at the lockers or the toilets with their voices sharp as their mascara wands.

"Why does he even bother with her?"

"She’s not even Bridgerton pretty."

"Maybe she blackmailed him."

She knew what they meant. She knew she wasn’t the type that belonged in their Instagram posts or group chats. But no one dared cross the line. Not when Eloise Bridgerton would level them with a single, withering look that made you rethink your entire personality. And espcieclly not after the bonfire, when a girl in Year 11 made a joke about Penelope’s hand-me-down jumper and Colin, without missing a beat, said, “Stop being a cow.”

Penelope had gone home that night with her cheeks burning. Not from shame. From something else. Something that felt too much like hope. But she knew better than to believe in hope.

Because protection didn’t mean she belonged.

Penelope knew how the cool girls wore their eyeliner sharp.How they shared lip gloss and secrets and inside jokes that weren’t for people like her. Their skirts were rolled at the waist, their laughter high and effortless. Penelope had mastered a different skill entirely— the art of invisibility . Lingering at the edges of conversation and nodding like she belonged, even if her shoes pinched, her dress never quite fit right and her curls never quite looked like they were supposed to.

She stood beside Eloise like a loyal footnote. She stood in Colin’s orbit like a satellite pretending she didn’t want to be the sun.

And despite it all, she loved him. Because he always noticed her. Not in the way she wanted, maybe. But enough to make her heart ache.

She felt it most at the Winter Ball.

Her dress was pale pink, floaty with soft tulle and delicate embroidery. Eloise had helped her pick it out on a rare afternoon when they both ditched prep and took the train to Camden. Penelope had stood in front of a dusty boutique mirror hands clenched in hope. Her mother had cried when she saw her try it on, pulling her into a tight hug and whispering something about how grown up she looked now.

She had never felt more like a girl in a storybook.

Until she walked into the venue.

The lights were too bright and the music too loud and hollow against the marble of the event hall. The girls looked like models. They were sleek and angular in couture dresses with perfect skin and practiced smiles. Penelope’s curls, despite her best attempt with a borrowed straightener and a mountain of serum, had started to frizz at the ends. Her lipstick was already fading. Her stomach churned and the heels hurt her feet. Still, she smiled through it anyway. She always smiled through it.

Colin was everywhere. He was on the dance floor, at the snack table, pulled into photos by classmates who didn’t know his middle name but tagged him in everything. He spoke to everyone like they already belonged to him. And girls with names like Clarissa and Tatiana tugged at his arm. The boys offered him drinks and teachers smiled too warmly when they passed.

Penelope watched from the edge of the crowd, sipping lukewarm punch and trying not to shrink into the wallpaper. Eloise stood beside her in a wine-colored velvet jumpsuit and combat boots, looking equally unimpressed with the whole production. 

“He’s dancing with Clarissa Fairbourne,” Eloise said flatly, popping a pretzel into her mouth. “She smells like entitlement and pomegranate.”

Penelope gave a tiny laugh, heart aching beneath the sequins of her bodice. “She looks like she belongs with him.”

“You belong with him,” Eloise said.

Penelope didn’t answer because she didn’t believe it. Not tonight where they are surrounded by all that glitter and noise.

Later, after Clarissa had been swept away by some rugby player and the music had softened into background hums, Penelope slipped out into the cold for air. She didn’t expect anyone to notice she was gone. Her dress had ripped slightly near the zipper when she’d gotten tangled in someone’s coat in the hallway. Her makeup had smudged beneath her eyes. Her mascara flaked when she blinked too hard. The drizzle in the air had started to curl her hair again in unpredictable, chaotic ways.

She didn’t care. She just needed to breathe. To exist outside the swirl of noise and feeling.

The air outside was sharp, sweet with petrichor and spring rot. She stood under the canopy, hugging her arms to her chest, ignoring how her shoulders shook against the cold.

And then, of course, Colin found her.

He was still in his suit, bowtie askew like someone had tried to straighten it and failed. His curls were damp. His expression softened the moment he saw her. “You looked beautiful tonight,” he said.

It was simple but it was everything.

Penelope’s heart gave a traitorous lurch. She had heard him say nice things before like offhanded compliments, kind teasing. But not like this. Not just for her. Not when she felt like the last girl anyone would notice in a room full of polished perfection.

And that was all she needed.

She smiled, shy but hopeful, voice barely rising above the rain tapping the concrete. “Colin… I still love you.” She said it softly. Steadily. Like it had always been true. Like she wasn’t holding back tears. Like the world wasn’t about to split in two.

He paused. Too long.

Something flickered across his face. Surprise, discomfort, maybe guilt. His mouth parted, but the words didn’t come fast enough. When they finally did, they were too gentle. “You’re sweet, Pen,” he said, like it was a compliment. Like it was kindness. “But it’ll pass. Crushes do.”

It didn’t matter that he said it kindly. Kindness still cuts when it confirms your worst fears.

She gave a quick nod. “Right. Of course.”

He didn’t know she’d spent two weeks memorizing a speech in case he said yes. He didn’t know she’d written his name in invisible ink at the edge of her planner. He didn’t know she had pictured this moment going a thousand different ways and none of them felt like this.

She turned before he could see the tear slip down her cheek. She wished she’d worn waterproof mascara. They didn’t talk much after that night. No fallout. Just…silence.

He still nodded at her in the halls. Still smiled, sometimes. But it felt like they were performing a script written months ago, and neither of them remembered the lines. She stopped going to every party. He stopped asking if she would. And when Eloise asked what had happened between them, Penelope just shrugged. “Nothing,” she said, and that was the truth of it.

Because sometimes it isn’t betrayal or cruelty that ends things. Sometimes it’s nothing at all. Just a moment. A pause too long. A kindness that hurt more than the truth.

The day Colin graduated, the Bridgertons threw a garden party in their usual fashion. Penelope stood near the back hedge with a slice of cake untouched on her plate. She wasn’t part of his circle that day. She was just a guest again. A girl in a borrowed dress. She watched him make the rounds. Hugging teachers, fist bumping classmates, charming the socks off everyone with that easy, golden grin. He looked older in his cap and gown. Taller somehow. Already halfway gone.

Eloise eventually pulled her aside, eyes bright with summer and plans for their final school year. But Penelope wasn’t really listening. Not when she caught sight of Colin across the lawn hugging Clarissa Fairbourne, laughing too loudly, kissing her cheek like it meant nothing.

That night, back in her room, she took out the old planner. The one with his name written in invisible ink along the edges. She held it in her hands for a long time. Then she closed it. And didn’t open it again.

Because Colin was moving forward. And for the first time, she realized she had to, too. Even if it meant doing it alone.

Penelope, Age 18

Colin, Age 20

They got into Oxford.

Penelope and Eloise, side by side, hands clasped so tightly on results day their knuckles turned white. Eloise screamed. Penelope laughed. Portia cried loudly and in public and declared it a triumph for late bloomers and questionable family legacies everywhere. She also cornered three separate newspaper editors at Waitrose for potential features which Penelope firmly shuts it down.

Still, it was a moment. A good one.

They moved into adjacent dorms on the north side of campus. They made Pinterest boards for their room decor, and labeled every bit of their shared kitchen shelf with passive-aggressive sticky notes. They joined clubs they would forget to attend and RSVP’d to lectures that started too early and felt too intimidating. They got matching enamel pins and matching hangovers and matching warnings for noise complaints.

Penelope Featherington had never felt more alive. Or more like herself. She’d left behind the version of her who whispered in hallways and shrank from cafeteria stares. She joined the editorial board of a student literary journal. She flirted. She held her own in debates. And when people didn’t look twice, she didn’t wilt.

She was blooming loudly, brilliantly. Finally.

And Colin was already there.

Two years older, in his final stretch of undergrad, pursuing a joint degree in International Relations and Languages because of course he was. He’d always been a contradiction. Adventurous but grounded, full of stories yet maddeningly private. The kind of person who walked into a room and instantly made you want to be braver.

He spotted Penelope at a student union mixer in their second week. Her copper curls catching the string lights, her laugh fuller than he remembered. She was in conversation with a film major named Jasmine and for a split second, Colin forgot why he came.

Something in his chest pulled. A flicker. A shift. She was different now. Grown. More radiant and more certain. Her voice didn’t waver when she spoke in seminars. She had opinions. Wit. A fire he hadn’t seen before.

And people noticed. Men lingered when she passed. Professors called on her more than once. Even the guy running the Philosophy & Wine club, whose whole identity revolved around being unimpressed, lit up when Penelope walked into a room.

He told himself it was pride and happiness. The warm, nostalgic affection for someone he’d known forever. That was all. At least, that’s what he kept repeating because anything else felt impossible. He didn’t have the words for the quiet pull in his chest. Not yet so he didn’t examine it.

They saw each other more than either expected.

Oxford was big in name but small in spirit and their circles bled into each other before they could stop it. Eloise made fast friends with half the International Relations girls who shared Colin’s electives, and Penelope’s literary crowd seemed magnetically drawn to the same coffee shop Colin holed up in to finish his papers or nurse a hangover.

They sat near each other at panels and across from each other at pub quiz nights. Colin started showing up at open mic nights where Penelope read her poems, always under a pseudonym and with shaking hands. She never announced it was her, but he knew. Her voice had grown stronger but he could still hear the tremor in her breath. He never said anything about it. Just clapped harder than anyone else when she stepped down, cheeks flushed, pretending she hadn’t just peeled herself open on stage.

They ended up at the same parties, the same late night falafel stands, the same battered sofas when mutual friends threw chaotic film marathons in student flats lit only by fairy lights and ambition. There were board games with missing pieces, half-drunk debates about Marxism and climate change, and that one night where Penelope fell asleep next to him during Spirited Away, her head dangerously close to his shoulder where Colin didn’t move.

Slowly, their friendship mended. Not like it used to be. There was no more treehouses, no more whispered secrets behind music rooms but it was lighter and wiser.

It happened at a party during spring term. Someone had filled a punch bowl with vodka and fruit juice. Someone else had started a game of spin the bottle that devolved into dare roulette. The music throbbed from cheap speakers in the corner, someone’s playlist alternating between Arctic Monkeys and throwback pop hits. Penelope didn’t remember much except the dizzy warmth in her limbs and the way the music blurred around the edges of her thoughts.

She had taken off her shoes. Her tights had a run in them and her curls were loose and wild in a way that made Colin’s stomach twist when he spotted her outside. She was perched on a low stone wall, sipping something in a red Solo cup, laughing at her own joke.

She looked up at him with that same light he’d once dismissed as childhood devotion. “You know,” she said, blinking up at him, “I’ve always loved you.” It came out like a breath. Like a secret escaping before it could be swallowed again.

He froze.

“Pen—”

“No, no, it’s okay,” she said quickly, waving her hand, as if that could erase it. “I’m tipsy and nostalgic and maybe a bit pathetic. It’s just the truth. I love you. I think I always have.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Long enough that hope tried to bloom, stupid and fragile. And then, gently said, “Pen…I’m seeing Marina.”

The name was like a slap and not because she hadn’t seen it coming. It was because she had. Because she’d seen the texts. The quiet glances. The way Marina had started showing up more at events with her arm looped casually through his. Because Penelope had once again fooled herself into thinking she could mean more than she did.

She swallowed. Nodded. “Of course you are. She’s beautiful.”

He opened his mouth like he wanted to say more, but nothing came out.

Penelope smiled a tight and hollow smile and tossed the rest of her drink into the grass. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll pass. Right?”

She started avoiding him after that. Not coldly and cruelly. Just enough. If he was invited to something, she RSVP’d late or ducked out early. When they crossed paths, she offered a polite smile and excused herself quickly. Eloise noticed, of course. So did Marina. But no one said anything.

Colin, for his part, didn’t know what he was doing wrong. Or maybe, he did but not in a way he could articulate. He didn’t understand the hollow ache in his chest when Penelope left a room. Couldn’t understand why Marina’s hand on his arm made him feel heavy instead of held. Why his eyes always found Penelope in a crowd, why he kept remembering the curve of her smile more vividly than any of Marina’s kisses.

But Penelope had said it herself.

She loved him.

And he—

He wasn’t ready.

Or he didn’t deserve it. Or maybe he’d missed his chance.

So when Marina leaned in one night and asked if they were “official,” he said yes.

Penelope saw the change. In the way Marina started wearing his hoodie. In the way he brought her to parties like an unspoken declaration. She didn’t blame him.

But she was angry. Not at Marina. Not even at Colin.

At herself.

For cracking open her heart again. For hoping again. For being the girl who could never quite unlove the boy who never really saw her. And this time, she promised herself, really promised, she wouldn’t say it again.

But then came the implosion.

It started as whispers.

“Did you hear?”

“Marina.”

“Cheated. I think.”

“No, Colin walked in on her!” 

“She was seeing that guy from Imperial. You know, the one with the motorcycle?” 

“No, no—she kissed someone at the foreign policy conference. That’s what I heard.”

“Well, Colin bought her a ring. Imagine.”

By the time the story reached full saturation, it had taken on a life of its own. Each version more scandalous than the last. Some said Marina had been quietly disinterested for months. Others claimed she’d strung Colin along, knowing he was in deeper than she’d ever be.

No one knew the exact truth. But everyone knew the fallout.

Colin stopped going to lectures. He bailed on his dissertation defense prep group. He ghosted group chats. He missed his speaking slot at the spring alumni forum. He got into a shouting match with one of Marina’s friends in the quad and left with a split knuckle and a warning from the dean.

And Penelope wanted nothing more than to comfort him. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and say, I’m here. I always have been. She wanted to tell him that Marina wasn’t the end of the road. That hearts were built to break and rebuild.

But she couldn’t. She wasn’t the one he had chosen. She wasn’t the one who got to stay.

Instead, she watched from the edges.

She saw him sitting alone on a bench behind the library, head bent low, hoodie pulled up like it could shield him from the world. She watched him snap a pencil in two during a study session he never should’ve shown up to. She caught him ducking into the cafe they once all shared, only to walk straight back out when he saw too many familiar faces.

She held her breath when she saw him across the courtyard, looking like a ghost of the boy she loved. She rehearsed saying “I’m sorry” a hundred times in her head and never said it once.

Because heartbreak is a loyalty test no one signs up for. And she had already lost.

She found out from Eloise that he was leaving.

Said he was deferring graduation to travel. Said he needed space. Said he wanted to write, or maybe teach English abroad, or maybe just be somewhere no one knew his name.

Violet was concerned. She asked him twice gently if he was sure, if he was running toward something or just away. Anthony on the other hand had exploded at first. Said it was irresponsible, foolish, selfish. But after seeing the way Colin came home late and slept through mornings, the way he barely spoke at dinner, how he’d stare at blank pages for hours without writing a word they both agreed. He needed the time.

Penelope pretended to be nonchalant. “That’s…understandable.”

“He’s a bloody idiot,” Eloise said. “Not just for leaving. But for everything.”

Penelope just gave a tired smile. She didn't have the energy to explain all the ways Eloise was right. Everyone knew the truth.

Colin Bridgerton was running from the shame, from the gossip, from the ruins of the future he almost had.

Penelope watched him board the train from a distance, behind a post like a stranger.

She saw him glance back once, brow furrowed, as if hoping for someone familiar in the crowd. She didn’t move. Didn’t wave or speak.

Later that night, she sat alone in her dorm, rain tapping against the window like a metronome for sorrow. She poured herself a glass of wine she didn’t want and opened a fresh page in her journal. She stared at the blank space and whispered, “Maybe now.”

Because for the first time since she was nine years old, Colin Bridgerton wasn’t just unavailable, he was gone. And while part of her mourned that deeply, like an ache sewn into bone, part of her felt something else.

Relief.

A space clearing in her chest where obsession had once lived. An exhale she didn’t realize she’d been holding for nearly a decade. Maybe now, she thought again. Maybe now, she could finally let go. 

Not because she didn’t love him. But because she deserved to love herself more.

Penelope, Age 22

Colin, Age 24  

Four years passed.

Colin Bridgerton became a name people knew not just because of his family, but because of his words. His bestselling travel memoirs blended wit with warmth, perspective with political undertones, reflections on borders, war zones, migration, and the hope that still clung like moss in forgotten corners of the world. He wrote and made people cry. He got invited to panels and radio interviews in different parts of the world. The kind of life he used to dream of, he was now living.

And still, something felt incomplete.

It wasn’t the accolades or the solitude. It wasn’t even the exhaustion that came with fame. It was the way his mother always asked, “Have you spoken to Penelope lately?” like she was treading water. The way Eloise bluntly once said, “You’re not lonely because you travel, Colin. You travel because you’re lonely.” The way London stopped feeling like home because she wasn’t waiting in it.

Penelope had stayed. She had bloomed.

Oxford had been a chrysalis. London became her wings.

She worked as an editor at Danbury House Publishing, one of the most prestigious houses in the city. Her calendar was color-coded. Her mornings began with oat lattes and poetry proofs.  Her evenings? Panels. Launch parties. Strategic solitude. She wore bold lipstick in meetings and knew her worth. She was the kind of woman who read manuscripts on the Tube, who gave speeches at literary festivals, who spoke kindly to interns and always remembered people’s birthdays.

She was the kind of woman people didn’t just respect, they remembered. The girl who used to wait in corners had become the woman people made room for.

She is also now dating Alfred Debling. Well-traveled, well-spoken, respected in the sustainability space. The kind of man who could wear linen and not look ridiculous. The kind of man who opened doors and listened to radio dramas unironically and an occasional science columnist for The Guardian. 

Colin hated that he couldn’t hate him.

Debling was…decent. Charming, in a way that didn’t demand attention. And worse, he made Penelope laugh. Not in a polite way but in the way that reached her eyes.

They ran into each other at a Bridgerton family dinner.

He hadn’t seen her in months. She wore a navy turtleneck and wide-leg trousers that made her look like a woman from a French film, too elegant to be real. Her hair was longer now, a little lighter at the ends. She greeted him like nothing had changed.

“Colin,” she said with a warm smile, genuine, gentle. “Welcome home.”

And he smiled, because what else was there to do? “Pen,” he breathed. “You look…”

“Like I pay my own taxes now?” she teased.

He laughed too loudly. Then softer. “Like yourself.”

It was that word. Yourself. That made her pause.

The kitchen was crowded. Gregory stealing canapes, Daphne mediating a baby toy war between the children, Violet directing dishes like an orchestra. It was loud, warm, glowing with all the old magic. But between him and Penelope, there was a silence that used to be filled with secrets.

Now, it pulsed with everything unsaid.

“How’s Alfred?” he asked. It wasn’t small talk. Not really.

She nodded. “He’s in Copenhagen. A think tank summit on renewable city planning.”

“Of course he is,” Colin said, half-joking.

She gave a small smile. “He’s good. We’re… good.”

The word didn’t land right in his chest. Like a note slightly out of tune.

“Glad to hear it,” he said, even if honestly speaking, it wasn’t.

Penelope tilted her head. “And you?”

He shrugged, like a man who had everything and somehow nothing.

“Still chasing flights. Still writing.”

“You’re still brilliant,” she said softly.

And God, it hurt. Because she meant it. And yet there was a wall now. A quiet one. Built brick by brick with her old confessions, his old rejections, years of late replies and missed chances.

They weren’t “Pen and Colin” anymore.

But he wanted them to be.

And so he tried, after that. Tried to text again. Just silly things at first like an inside joke from years ago, a meme she would’ve sent him before he even knew what a meme was. He sent photos of pastries from that little French place near Covent Garden. She never said no. But she also never said yes first.

He tried to ask about her authors, her latest acquisitions, her favorite stories, the ones that made her eyes light up like stained glass. And she told him, slowly, cautiously, like someone testing the floorboards after a flood.

Cautiously and gently, she let him in again.

One evening, over a casual, late dinner at a small Persian place they used to sneak off to during uni, he said it, like a fragile offering.“I missed this.”

Penelope stirred her tea with a clink, looked up and smiled a kind, careful smile. Like she had spent years learning how to survive him. “I missed you too,” she said.

It was something. And it was everything to Colin.

But sometimes, she forgot things. Small things. Forgettable to anyone else, but not to him. Not when he’d spent half the day picking the perfect pub for trivia night, or tracking down the obscure poetry book she once said made her believe in romance again. They are trying to revive the Friday night movie marathon that used to be their unspoken tradition when they were teens. Instead, she texted apologetically, "I forgot. I’m so sorry. Alfred’s parents are in town." Or "Can we reschedule? Something came up at work."

Each time, Colin said, "Of course. No worries."

Each time, he meant, "I miss the version of you who remembered me first."

And slowly, the feelings bloomed again. It became quiet and violent.

She used to look at him with love. Now, she looked past him with peace. That was the worst part for Colin. To watch her glow like all the heartbreak he caused had just…washed away.

He remembered once thinking he was the sun in her orbit. Now he realized he was just passing through. She laughed easily but never quite the way she used to when he was the reason. She touched his arm when saying goodbye but not in the way that lingered. She had moved on and he was just now realizing that the space she used to fill inside him had turned into a void he didn’t know how to carry.

Colin felt it in his ribs, the ache of a home he used to belong to. The knowledge that she was healing from him in real time, and there was nothing he could do about it but keep showing up too late. He found himself watching her more than he meant to. The tilt of her head when she read. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was trying not to cry at a film. The way she said “thank you” like she always meant it. He remembered the girl who used to tell him she loved him in ways both small and staggering.

In treehouses. On papers. At parties.

And how he had taught her not to.

And now that she didn’t anymore, now that she had learned to protect herself from him, it was unbearable. Because she had been his constant. His compass.

And now she was just… happy. Somewhere else. With someone else. She wasn’t his anymore.

And the cruelest thing?

She had stopped waiting. But he hadn't.

Colin had been meaning to tell her for weeks. Not in some dramatic, showstopping way. He just wanted to tell her honestly. Like he should have all those years ago. But every time the moment presented itself, he faltered.

He’d invite her to dinner, thinking maybe this is the night . She’d laugh at his joke, wipe sauce from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand, and look so stunningly herself that the words, I love you, would bubble up but he’d swallow them with his wine.

He was terrified of ruining it. He was terrified of saying the thing too late and watching her close up again. He was terrified of undoing all the quiet work it had taken to rebuild what he’d once carelessly broken.

So he said nothing.

And it nearly killed him.

But, it happened by the river during a Sunday walk. It was unusually warm for early spring. The kind of weather that invited honesty. They strolled beside the water, warm light skipping off the surface like it had somewhere better to be. They talked about books, as they often did.

She recommended a memoir she’d just edited. She said there was something lyrical and gutting about girlhood and grief. He promised he’d read it, even though he already knew he would struggle to get through it without thinking of her on every page.

He told her about a woman in Greece who’d sold him figs and a poem that was handwritten on the back of a bus ticket. The kind of moment he used to live for. The kind of moment that used to feel like enough.

She smiled. “You always find poetry in the strangest places.”

“You are the strangest place I ever found it,” he wanted to say.

But he didn’t.

And then, silence.

The breeze picked up. The air carried the scent of late magnolia. Her hand brushed his by accident and he felt it like lightning. She smiled politely and tucked her hand into her coat pocket.

He couldn’t take it anymore.

“I think I love you, Pen,” he whispered, wind lifting his curls.

Penelope looked at him, heart steady for once.

“It will pass,” she said.

He blinked. “What?”

“That’s what you told me. Every time. So I believed you.” Her voice cracked, but she didn’t let it falter. Not this time. She’d learned how to bleed without making a scene.

Colin looked like he’d been struck. The irony that his own words now a blade had sliced him clean open.

“Pen, I didn’t mean—”

“I know. But I did.” She gave a small, sad smile. “You don’t get to say it when it’s convenient.”

And it was devastating. Because there wasn’t anger in her voice. Only a quiet grief. The kind of sadness you carry in your bones. The kind that comes from waiting too long for someone to see you, only for them to show up when you’ve already taught yourself to stop hoping.

Colin opened his mouth again, but she was already walking. Not fast. Not furious.

Just away.

And he stood there, watching her disappear into the soft light of spring. The girl he’d taken for granted. The woman he’d fallen in love with too late.

And the ache in his chest wasn’t just heartbreak.

It was knowing he had no one to blame but himself.

Of course, it was Daphne’s idea. A Bridgerton family holiday in Tuscany. A vineyard owned by one of their father’s friends. It was supposed to be a chance to unwind, to reconnect, and to breathe. Colin didn’t know she was invited until Eloise rolled her eyes and said, “Obviously I’m bringing her. She’s family.”

Penelope came with Alfred. She wore sundresses and sandals and sunglasses perched in her curls. She laughed at Alfred’s jokes. Took work calls under the terrace in two languages. Read literary fiction by the pool and annotated the margins in pencil. She moved like someone who had finally learned how to take up space.

Colin couldn’t escape her.

He didn’t want to.

But it felt like purgatory watching her brush hair from her eyes as Alfred whispered something that made her laugh too hard. Watching her pass him wine at dinner without looking too long. Watching her live in a life he should have built with her.

It felt like being haunted by a future that could’ve been.

He wasn’t jealous of Alfred Debling.

That was the lie he told himself. Because Alfred was fine. Better than fine. Smart, considerate, charming in that quiet way that didn’t demand attention but held it anyway. He treated Penelope like she mattered. Like her words carried weight. Like her joy was his personal mission.

And Colin hated how easy it was to like him. Hated that Debling wasn’t the villain in this story. He was simply the man who showed up on time.

The tipping point came after dinner, on the third night.

The sun had dipped low, turning the vineyard gold and forgiving. Penelope was wearing white linen and red lipstick, and she was smiling at something Alfred said as they stood together by the low stone wall. Colin didn’t hear the joke. Just the laugh. The sound of it.

And something inside him broke.

“I love you!” he shouted, louder than he meant to.

Everyone froze. The laughter around them died.

Penelope turned to him slowly, glass halfway to her lips. There was no triumph in her face. Only calm, tired distance.

“Colin, it will pass,” she said.

And then he truly felt the weight of all the times he hadn’t loved her back when it mattered. The gravity of years she had waited for something he had been too blind, too proud, too late to give. She had finally stopped.

Later that evening, while the others cleared dessert plates and tension still hung in the air like heavy perfume, Alfred found Colin leaning against the old vineyard wall, knuckles white on a glass he hadn’t touched.

“I’m not angry,” Alfred said softly.

Colin didn’t look at him. “You should be.”

Alfred shrugged. “Maybe. But I’m not the one you hurt.”

Colin winced. “She doesn’t love me anymore.”

“I think part of her always will. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

Colin finally turned, eyes red, jaw clenched.

Alfred didn’t flinch. “But you don’t get to show up in the third act and ask to be the hero after you've written yourself out of the plot.”

There was no venom in his voice. “She deserves more than your epiphany,” Alfred added. And then he walked away.

Leaving Colin alone with his glass and the truth.

Penelope went back to London. Colin went home wrecked. The heartbreak wasn’t in her words. It was in her eyes. In the peace on her face when she looked at him like he was part of a chapter she’d finished rereading. Like he was the paperback you dog-ear in youth but eventually outgrow.

And the worst part? She didn’t even look like she was pretending.

Penelope wasn’t waiting anymore. She was living with Alfred Debling. Intelligent, kind, and conveniently not the boy who broke her heart five times.

Colin had no claim.

No rights to rewrite the ending. Only guilt. And regret. And a hundred sleepless nights echoing her voice:

“It will pass.”

But it didn’t.

Not for him.

It had been more than a full decade since the first time she’d said she loved him. And now, for the first time, he understood just how much he had lost.

“You know,” Eloise said one evening, sipping wine while scrolling through Penelope’s vacation post with Debling, “your timing is bloody Shakespearean.”

Colin, slouched on the Bridgerton family room couch, barely looked up from the travel journal he wasn’t writing in. “Tragic, you mean?”

“Tragic, idiotic, moronic…take your pick. But at least Romeo didn’t take more than a decade to figure it out.”

He groaned. “Thanks.”

Eloise leaned forward, wine glass in one hand, phone still glowing with Penelope’s sunkissed smile on the other. “I’m just saying,” she said, voice softening just a little, “you spent years making her feel invisible. You don’t get to be surprised when she disappears.”

In that moment, something split wide open inside Colin. Not a bolt of lightning. Not a sudden epiphany. But the slow, crushing truth:

He hadn’t fallen in love with Penelope when she moved on. He’d been in love with her the entire time. His brain just took a while to catch up with what his heart already knew.

He thought about it constantly now. How easy it had been to accept her loyalty without question. How convenient it was to let her orbit around him without ever looking up and wondering why she stayed. He remembered every confession she'd made. Nine, twelve, fourteen, eighteen. And how he’d met them all with patronizing shrugs and soft refusals.

“It will pass,” he’d said.

Like her love was a fever. Like her devotion was some childish thing to outgrow. Like she hadn’t been handing him her heart over and over, waiting for him to stop looking away.

She’d deserved better. Still did. And it haunted him that the only reason she’d finally stopped wasn’t because the love had faded…but because she had learned how to protect herself from it.

So Colin started rebuilding. This time, not for her. Not to win her.

But because the only way he’d ever deserve to stand next to her again was if he became the kind of man who knew what he had when he had it.

He cut back on traveling. Not entirely but just enough to plant his feet again. He picked up teaching part-time at his old university, leading workshops for students studying political narrative and cross-cultural storytelling. He spent more time with Anthony and Benedict, not just as brothers but as friends. He made the effort to show up for his sisters whether that meant last minute babysitting, errand runs or simply being the brother who answered the phone. He started being there for Gregory and helped him navigate his questions about girls and fear and what it meant to not have it all figured out yet. He let Hyacinth drag him to late night snack runs and rooftop talks where they didn’t always speak but always understood. And he let Violet in, no longer hiding behind charm or distance, letting her love him even when he couldn’t quite love himself.

He learned to sit with regret. To write through it. To own it.

And when it came to Penelope, he kept his distance deliberately. He didn’t interfere with her relationship again. Not once.

He became the kind of friend who carried an extra charger in his bag because hers always died. The kind of friend who remembered her deadlines and brought her Thai food on long edit nights. The kind of friend who walked her home from Eloise’s flat, never once letting his gaze linger too long even though he wanted to memorize the way the streetlights danced on her curls.

He clapped when she announced her promotion at Danbury House. He laughed at Alfred’s dry jokes during group dinners even when they made his chest ache. When Penelope accidentally bailed on their plans for a third time in two months, he didn’t guilt her. He just replied, “No worries. Rain check?” and meant it.

He never showed up uninvited. Never asked for more than she could give.

But he was there.

Always.

Quietly.

And still, it wasn’t enough.

Because she wasn’t his.

And maybe she never would be.

One afternoon, after helping Eloise pack for a short research trip abroad, he lingered behind to finish folding boxes. Penelope arrived to return a borrowed book. The two of them ended up in the kitchen, standing on opposite ends of the island, the kettle whistling between them like a peace offering.

She laughed softly at something he said and then she sobered. Her eyes became steady.

“Colin,” she said, fingers curling lightly around the edge of the counter. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Why now?”

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

She hesitated. “All this effort. All this… presence. Why now?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it again.

She nodded, more to herself than to him. “That’s what I thought.”

He frowned. “Pen…”

She cut him off gently. “You don’t get to love someone like they’re permanent and treat them like they’re optional.”

The words landed like a sucker punch. Because he had. Over and over.

He hadn’t meant to. But that didn’t make it better.

She gave a small, weary smile. “I’m not saying it to hurt you. I say that because I used to think love was about endurance. And maybe it is. But it can’t only be that.”

She left him standing there, the kettle still whistling behind him, burning steam into the silence.

So he lived in the space between watching her love someone else and punishing himself for every second he hadn’t chosen her when he could have.

Every day became a study in restraint.

Every moment, a reminder that love, when left unspoken too long, could harden into a kind of absence that even time couldn’t reverse.

One night, as he sat alone on his balcony, nursing a whiskey he hadn’t touched, he opened an old travel journal. A scrap of paper fluttered out. It was a scribble Penelope had made during a pub quiz years ago. Her writing was looped and rushed and unmistakably hers.

You’ll always have a place in my story. Even if I’m just a footnote in yours.

He wept.

For the girl who had waited.

For the boy who hadn’t seen her.

For the man who would never again take love for granted.

Penelope, Age 24

Colin, Age 26

Debling’s research took him to Bhutan. Then to Peru. Then a fellowship in New York. At first, it had been exciting and romantic. They shared Google Calendars and promised to meet in the middle. Copenhagen in spring, Tokyo in August. For a while, those plans felt real. Tangible.

Penelope tried. God, she tried. She scheduled early morning calls. She mailed him annotated books with sticky notes that read “this reminded me of you.” She stayed up until 3 a.m. on weeknights just to hear his voice for ten minutes, half-asleep and half-hers. She wore his hoodie when she worked late and pretended the scent didn’t fade. She kept a jar of foreign coins on her desk labeled Places We’ll Go .

But long distance love wasn’t for the faint of heart. And Penelope’s heart had already been through the shredder.

She didn’t realize she’d reached her limit until one Sunday evening, alone in her flat, her laptop open to a frozen Zoom screen, her tea cold beside her. The call had dropped again. She didn’t even bother redialing.

Something inside her had quieted. Not broken. Just… surrendered.

She ended it the following Friday, on a video call that felt less like a breakup and more like the closing of a door that had been left ajar too long.

No drama. No tears. Just that soft, steel voice Debling had always admired.

“I don’t think I’m built for a relationship that lives on screens,” she said.

He nodded slowly, the corner of his mouth twitching like he wanted to smile but couldn’t quite make it stick. “I know.”

“You deserve someone who’s…whole.”

“You deserve someone who makes you feel like you’re not still waiting.” He said it kindly. Too kindly like a man who always knew he’d only ever had part of her.

The conversation ended with mutual well wishes and a promise to stay friends, though they both understood that promise would stretch thin over time like the rest of it had.

After she closed her laptop, Penelope sat in silence then curled on her sofa and drew her knees to her chest. She didn’t cry, not because it didn’t hurt. But because the ache was too familiar now to demand tears. She’d done this before. Loved someone who couldn’t stay.

Only this time, she was the one who chose to leave first.

And somewhere deep down, she realized, maybe that was growth. Maybe that was grief. Maybe it was both.

Colin found out through Eloise.

They were sitting in the back garden of the Bridgerton family home, sharing a pot of tea and picking at the remnants of scones left over from Violet’s latest bake.

“She and Debling broke up. About a week ago,” Eloise said casually, stirring her cup like she hadn’t just detonated something inside him.

Colin froze. His hand hovered mid-air, halfway to the jam jar. He didn’t breathe for a second too long, pulse thudding in his ears louder than the clink of porcelain.

“Why didn’t she tell me?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

Eloise glanced over. “Would you have, if you were her?”

He didn’t answer. Because he wouldn’t have.

Because Penelope Featherington had learned the hardest way what happened when she trusted him with her vulnerable heart. And it was only just starting to mend. He had spent years being the wound. The apology wasn’t enough.

So he didn’t make a move.

Not yet.

Instead, he went to the tea shop near Marylebone. The one with the hand-labeled glass jars and the old man who remembered customers by smell more than name. He asked if they still stocked the white tea with pear blossoms. They did.

She’d mentioned it once, years ago, during a rainstorm in Oxford. Said it reminded her of writing by the window while thunderstorms rolled in. He had remembered. Of course he had.

The tea arrived at her flat two days later. No signature on the envelope, just a handwritten note saying:

“For the heart you always protected.

From the man who never deserved it.”

She didn’t reply.

She was moving flats. Somewhere sleeker and nearer the river with better light. He offered to help, showing up on a rainy Saturday in his ratty college sweatshirt with croissants from her favorite bakery and a roll of bubble wrap under one arm. She stared at him for a beat. Then stepped aside and said, “Shoes off.”

She thanked him with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. He didn’t push.

She helped him restructure his travel blog pitch when he admitted he was stuck. She scribbled in the margins of his draft, pointed to a paragraph and said, “This part? This is the heart. Start here.”

He drove her to the airport when she had a business trip, let her nap against the window in silence, didn’t say a word when she murmured Debling’s name in her sleep and then went quiet again.

Little by little, Penelope laughed again. She laughed around him. Still not like before. No breathless affection or soft-eyed wonder. Just something wary. Like her heart had barbed wire now.

But he lived for those laughs. And hated himself for it. Because she never lingered. Never stared. Never looked at him like he was home.

And that broke Colin Bridgerton more than rejection ever could.

He tried not to hope. Tried not to imagine. But love wasn’t logical. It was cruel and patient. And anchored in regret.

He found himself watching her across rooms. Her hands wrapped around a mug, her mouth twisted in concentration as she read drafts, the way she adjusted her glasses when she was trying not to cry at films.

He loved her in silence. He loved her without expectation.

And that’s how he knew it was real.

Not because she was suddenly available. But because he would’ve waited forever, even if she never turned back.

He couldn't tell her yet. But it was there in the way he stood slightly closer than he used to, in the way he memorized her new routine, in the way he never let her carry heavy things or walk home alone. In the way he always let her pick the restaurant and never made her explain her reasons.

He started learning her again.

The new her. The healed her. The her who had survived him.

And when she smiled at him one Thursday afternoon while handing back his printed itinerary, he had to look away.

Because this time, he wouldn’t chase her.

This time, he would earn her. Even if it took a lifetime.

She hadn’t seen him in weeks. Not properly. There had been short, polite texts. The occasional email with a poem or an article she might like. But she hadn’t looked him in the eye since the afternoon he dropped off her revised proofs with a quiet “Take care, Pen.”

And yet, on the coldest, wettest Tuesday London had coughed up in months, he was there.

It was the kind of rain that didn’t fall so much as settle. It was low and needling, threading its way beneath skin and collar and breath. The kind of rain that made time feel slower, heavier, like the sky was mourning something no one could name.

Penelope stood outside Danbury House, her curls slicked to her cheeks, mascara pooling faintly beneath her eyes, her phone dead and her patience thinner than the useless canopy above her. It wasn’t the first time the city felt like it was conspiring against her.

And then, through the haze and the headlights, she saw him.

His car pulled up to the curb without drama. No honk. No signal. Just Colin, in the driver’s seat, hair damp, jaw tight, eyes impossibly soft. He leaned across and opened the passenger door.

“Get in,” he said.

She froze, water clinging to her lashes.

How did he know? Had he been waiting? Had he planned this, somehow? Did he check the weather? Her schedule? Her silence?

The questions tangled in her like static. Her throat tightened with suspicion she didn’t want to voice because part of her wanted to believe he was just there. That he came without an agenda. That maybe he had known the forecast, and had decided to face it anyway. For her.

“Please,” he added, quieter now. “You’ll get sick.”

Her body moved before her doubts did. She got in.

The car was quiet for a while.

The heater hummed low. Rain needled the windshield like a metronome for everything unsaid. Her soaked coat dripped onto the passenger seat. She clutched the seatbelt like a lifeline, unsure what to say. Colin didn’t say anything. He didn’t force it. He just sat there, hands gripping the wheel, not looking at her.

Penelope stared straight ahead, trying to breathe through the tightness in her throat. She didn’t know why it still felt like it mattered. Why this mattered. Why he did. Then, she broke the silence.

“You’re good at waiting now,” she murmured, not quite looking at him.

“I’ve had practice,” he replied.

Then, his voice dropped lower. Firmer. “I’m never doing it again.”

That’s what made her turn to him slowly. Wary, as if afraid of what she’d see.

“Colin…”

“I’m not here to take anything,” he said quickly, eyes still fixed ahead. “I’m here to return something. What I should’ve kept safe all along.”

Her breath hitched. She shook her head, the beginnings of tears trapped in her throat. “You always say the right things when it’s too late.” she whispered, lips trembling.

“Not this time,” he said.

And then, still not looking at her, like he didn’t trust himself if he did—

“I love you, Pen.” It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t grand. It was a confession pressed into fogged glass and frayed silence. A truth worn soft from the weight of everything that had come before it.

Penelope blinked. Slowly. Rain streaked across the windshield like it had nowhere better to be.

“I’ve loved you for a long time,” Colin added, quieter now. “Before I had the language for it. Before I knew what it meant to lose you.”

Her breath caught.

“I know it doesn’t undo anything,” he went on. “I know I don’t get to rewrite the times I didn’t say it back. But I need you to know it now. Even if it changes nothing.”

He finally looked at her. Eyes bloodshot. Shoulders drawn tight, like he’d been holding this in for years. Which he had. Penelope didn’t speak. Because what do you say when the person who wrecked you finally becomes the person you needed. But just years too late?

So she didn’t answer. She just cried quietly. With the kind of restraint that comes only from heartbreak that’s too old to scream anymore. Her shoulders trembled once, then stilled. He didn’t touch her. He just let her.

And when she whispered, “I don’t know what to do with that,” he only nodded. “I don’t expect you to.”

Silence settled again.

But it wasn’t empty anymore. It was saturated ike the rain, like her eyes, like the breath she didn’t realize she was holding until it left her in a shudder.

There was something awful and beautiful about sitting in a car with the man who had held your heart at every stage of your life and never known what to do with it. About feeling that same heart stir when you swore you had buried it years ago.

Penelope’s voice was barely above a whisper.

“I don’t think I ever stopped loving you.”

That made him flinch visibly. “I think I just… pressed it down. Tucked it away until it didn’t ache so loud.” Her gaze drifted to the fogged windshield. “But then you show up, and it’s like—like it never left. Like my heart doesn’t care that it’s been years. That you weren’t ready. That I waited until I couldn’t anymore.”

She blinked hard. “And that scares me.”

He turned to her then. His voice cracked. “Pen, I’m sorry. For all of it. For the shrugs, the excuses. For how easy it was to take you for granted just because you made it easy.”

“You did,” she said softly. “You made me feel small, Colin. Like I’d been imagining it all.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. I thought it would always be you and me—just there, just constant. You were home, and I walked away from that like I’d have forever to come back.”

He paused, then added, softer, “But I don’t love you because you stopped loving me. I don’t want you because you’re suddenly out of reach. This isn’t some dramatic last-ditch grasp at something I missed.”

“Then what is it?” she asked, voice splintering. “Because I don’t know how to trust this anymore. I don’t know how to trust you.”

He finally met her eyes. The rain ran in rivulets down the windows, down the backs of his curls but he didn’t blink.

“It’s real, Penelope. It’s the most real thing I’ve ever felt. Not because I miss being adored. Not because I’m lonely. But because I’ve seen you walk away and it didn’t make me love you any less.”

He drew a breath that rattled deep in his chest then added, “My love for you isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s not some cinematic thing that strikes in one perfect moment. It’s quiet. It grows. It survives things. I didn’t fall in love with you because you were gone. I’ve always been in love with you. I was just too late to understand it.”

She looked down at her lap. Her hands were clenched.

“You want me because I left.”

“No.” His voice didn’t waver this time. “I still want you, even now that you might never come back.”

She bit her lip, tears thick and hot in her throat. “You broke something in me, Colin.”

“I know,” he said. “And I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to repair it. Even if you never love me again. Even if I only get to carry this love on my side of the road.”

Then she whispered, “I want to believe you. But I don’t know how”

“Then don’t,” he whispered. She looked up at him again, startled.

“Don’t believe me. Just…watch me.”

He reached for her hand but didn’t touch it. Just hovered, trembling.

“All I’m asking for is the chance to love you, Penelope. I don’t care if you don't say it back. I don’t care if you never feel the same way again. I just want to love you for real this time. No conditions. No timelines. No expectations.”

The rain softened outside. The silence did not.

Because love wasn’t a cinematic kiss in the rain.

It was this. Two people, soaking wet, bleeding at the seams, trying to stitch something back together with trembling fingers. It was love with the lights on. The cracks were visible and the damage has been named. Hopefully, that was the kind worth saving.

Penelope didn’t say yes. Didn’t reach for him. But she didn’t leave. And when she exhaled, her shoulders finally lowered by an inch. Her hand remained between them untouched but not withdrawn. 

And Colin, for the first time in his life, was okay with just something . Because it meant she was still here.

Penelope, Age 24 (1 day before her 25th birthday)

Colin, Age 27  

In the months that followed the rain-soaked car ride, Colin kept his promise not through declarations, but through actions. He didn’t press, didn’t chase, didn’t beg. Instead, he loved her the only way he knew how now–quietly, completely, and without condition.

At Christmas, he gave her a first edition of her favorite childhood novel, Anne of Green Gables, with her name embossed in gold foil on the inside cover. Tucked between the pages was a letter, not asking for anything, just thanking her for being the reason he fell in love with stories in the first place.

She didn’t cry in front of anyone, but Eloise saw the redness in her eyes later that day.

“You know he picked that months in advance,” Eloise said, arms crossed as she leaned against Penelope’s kitchen counter. “Had it shipped from Nova Scotia. Went through two rare book sellers.”

Penelope ran her fingers over the leather spine, voice small. “Why would he do that?”

Eloise hesitated, then sighed. “Because he’s finally being the brother I wish he had been ten years ago.”

Penelope didn’t answer but the book stayed clutched in her hand the whole day.

There were other moments.

A surprise invite to a poetry reading in Soho, just as one of her authors was being featured. A hot water bottle waiting outside her flat door after she texted in frustration about cramps. A string of emails, each one linking to a place he thought she’d love. Bookstores in Copenhagen, a cozy cafe in Bath, a writing retreat in the Lake District.

He never asked to come. He just remembered and listened.

Colin loved her in the quiet ways. In the moments no one else saw.

Like the morning he waited outside her building with her favorite coffee order not because she asked but because he knew she had a brutal round of meetings and wouldn’t have time to grab it herself. Or the night she casually mentioned being too tired to cook, and he sent over takeout from the Thai place she used to order from in college. No note. No expectation. Just a delivery driver at her door with exactly what she liked.

He fixed her kitchen drawer when it jammed. Helped Eloise carry Penelope’s boxes when she decided to reorganize her flat one weekend, without needing to be asked. And when she got sick for three days straight and didn’t tell anyone, he noticed she hadn’t been responding to texts. Eloise found a care package on her doorstep by the afternoon—lemon ginger tea, honey lozenges, a handwritten note that simply read, “Your silence is loud. I hope you feel better soon.”

He didn’t sign it. But she knew.

Even when work took Colin away for weeks at a time, he never let her slip from his orbit. When he traveled to the Philippines to document post-typhoon recovery efforts and the quiet resilience of coastal towns, Penelope received a small hand carved box. Inside was a wreath of white blooms, the petals soft and star-shaped, pressed between parchment and still faintly fragrant. Tucked beneath was a letter, penned in Colin’s handwriting. They call this flower the sampaguita. It means I promise you. This made me think of you. Of what I never said and what I still carry. I promise you, Pen I will not waste what remains. Not the time. Not you.

From Scotland, she received a parcel wrapped in brown paper and twine, the corners softened from travel. Inside was a small stone charm carved in the shape of a heart, worn smooth like it had weathered centuries of storm. Beneath it was a handwritten note. There’s a legend from the Highlands of the “clach cridhe,” the heart stone. They say if you give one to someone you’ve wronged and they accept it, it means your souls have been bound anew. Not to forget the past, but to forgive it. To begin again. I know I can’t ask for that outright. But if this ever finds your palm, I hope it feels like something closer to peace.

And when he flew to Kyoto to explore cultural memory through architecture, another parcel arrived. An origami crane that is folded from aged washi paper and tied with soft twine. The note beneath read, They say a thousand cranes can grant a wish. But even a thousand wouldn’t be enough for all the ways I failed you. I folded one anyway. For hope.

Because for him, distance had nothing on devotion.

And then came Colin’s birthday.

Violet threw her usual fuss. The entire Bridgerton family filled the drawing room with noise and laughter, cake in the center, candles flickering beneath the chandelier.

“Wait,” Daphne said. “Make a wish first.”

Colin stood with his hands braced on the table, staring at the cake. Then slowly, instinctively, his gaze lifted. Penelope sat on the sofa beside Eloise. Her hands wrapped around a glass of wine, her gaze on the cake until she felt him looking. She glanced up.

And their eyes locked.

For a breathless moment, everything went still.

Colin closed his eyes.

Let her look at me the way she used to.

Just once more.

Let me deserve it this time.

Then he blew out the candles and the room erupted in cheers.

Penelope clapped softly. She didn’t smile but she didn’t look away.

Then one evening, at a mutual friend’s rooftop party, someone made an offhand joke about Penelope being “the one who pined.” It was said without malice but it lingered.

Colin had overheard. He didn’t confront the guy. He just stepped towards the group, his voice steady and unflinching. “I did,” he said, his words cutting clean through the noise. “She did love me. More honestly and more fiercely than anyone else I’ve ever met.”

A hush settled. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“I ignored it. I dismissed it. I broke her heart more times than I want to admit because I was too foolish, too self-involved, to see what was right in front of me.”

No one moved.

Colin looked at his old circle, now quiet. “So if you’re going to laugh, laugh at me. I’m the one who had her love and didn’t deserve it.”

Later that night, Penelope found him standing alone at the railing, eyes lost in the skyline.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said softly, coming to stand beside him.

He glanced at her. “I know. But I wanted to.”

She stared ahead. The wind caught the edges of her hair. “You didn’t get angry.”

“No.” He let out a breath. “Because it wasn’t untrue. You did love me. And I made you carry it alone.”

He turned to her then, voice low and full of something bone-deep. “But you were never the one who pined, Pen. You were the one who endured. I was the fool.”

She didn’t say anything. But she stayed beside him the rest of the night.

Eloise, who was always skeptical, eventually stopped rolling her eyes. One afternoon, she caught Colin fussing over a broken hinge on Penelope’s garden gate.

“You know,” she said, arms crossed, “most men would’ve given up by now.”

Colin glanced up, mud on his palms, shirt clinging with sweat. “Most men didn’t waste ten years.”

Eloise said nothing. Just nodded, once.

Colin Bridgerton, who once loved loudly and lived without pause, now loved her like tide to shore relentless, quiet, inevitable. He was present, patient, and penitent. And whether she ever turned back toward him or not, he didn’t know. Still, it was worth every effort to him because this wasn’t about earning her love anymore. It was about honoring it.

It was a week before Penelope’s 25th birthday when Colin called Eloise.

“Do you think she’ll come?” he asked.

“Depends,” Eloise replied. “Is this about you or her?”

“Her,” he said, without hesitation.

“Then yeah,” Eloise said after a pause. “She’ll come.”

And so, the plan unfolded.

He enlisted Hyacinth and Gregory to help string up the fairy lights. Gregory pretended to be annoyed grumbling about bugs and ladders but didn’t complain once when it started to drizzle. Hyacinth brought a Polaroid camera and snapped test photos to make sure the lighting was soft and not harsh. She said something about ambiance then smiled too knowingly and said nothing else.

Violet got old quilts and cushions from the attic. They were faded but familiar and carried the scent of wildflowers and home. She didn’t ask questions, only kissed Colin’s cheek and said, “She loves you, dearest. She just doesn’t know if she’s allowed to believe it yet. Be patient with the armor she’s learned to wear. Make sure she sees you waiting on the other side of it.”

Benedict arrived with lanterns, battery-powered tea lights, and a crooked grin that said about time. He lit a few to test them then spent a quiet moment standing inside the treehouse with Colin, looking around.

“Feels like something good is about to happen,” he said.

Francesca, ever the quiet one, sent a stack of Penelope’s favorite poetry collections from Edinburgh. Each dog-eared and gently annotated.

Colin did the rest. He cleaned the treehouse himself. Not just swept. He scrubbed the wood. Cleared the cobwebs from the corners. Patched the old roof with waterproof panels. Sanded the rough edges of the floorboards so no one would catch a splinter. He painted over the initials he and Penelope had carved when they were twelve. Not to erase them, but to start again. A new story, written over memory, not in place of it.

He scattered the space with soft things. Lavender sachets, cushions that wouldn’t hurt her back, her favorite white tea with pear blossoms set neatly in a corner. A worn copy of Jane Eyre rested by the window, its spine already cracked from her thumb.

In the center, propped gently against a pillow, sat a single envelope. Her name on the front. His handwriting, careful but unpretentious. No flourish. Just Penelope.

He stared at it for a long time before placing it down. This wasn’t a grand performance. It wasn’t a campaign. It was a quiet offering.

A whisper of I see you now.

A vow to stop running from what had always been there.

All he texted her that afternoon was:

“I just need you to trust me. Tonight. ”

No context. No follow up.

Just hope folded into 8 words.

And she did. 

Despite every bruise, every scar, every ache that lived inside her like muscle memory. Penelope followed him into the countryside. Past the noise. Past the years. She didn’t ask questions or press or let herself imagine. 

She just watched the trees blur past her window, fingers curled into her coat sleeve, heart pounding a beat she hadn’t heard in years. Because some part of her, however small, however scared, still believed in him. Still believed that maybe, just maybe, he meant it this time.

When the car curved down a familiar lane, she froze. Her breath caught. Aubrey Hall. Her stomach dipped and her heart twisted in a way that surprised her. She hadn’t been here in years. Not since she taught herself how to stop needing this place. And yet, here she was again.

Colin parked by the back trail, the one only Bridgertons and honorary members of their messy, beautiful family knew by heart. The one they’d used as children when they were running away from responsibility and toward wonder.

“Come on,” Colin said gently, already walking ahead. His voice didn’t carry urgency. It carried with reverence.

Penelope hesitated only for a second before she stepped out of the car. The grass was damp, her boots sinking slightly into the earth. She followed him through the garden she once helped Violet tend that is now overgrown, wild with lavender and thyme.

And then there it was, the treehouse.

But not as she remembered it.

Because it had grown up too.

Twinkling with fairy lights strung through the branches like stars. Wooden steps now replaced the old rope ladder. Inside, a warm glow spilled from the windows, gentle and golden, like it had been waiting just for her. She paused at the base. Her breath caught in her throat.

“This is part of your birthday surprise,” Colin said behind her quietly. “You don’t have to go up. But…if you want to—”

She climbed. Her chest felt too small for her ribs, her breath snagging between the then and now.

Inside, it was warm. Simple. Thoughtful. So unmistakably him.

Blankets layered the floor in soft stacks. Lanterns flickered on the windowsill, throwing golden shapes against the wooden panels. On one side: a low picnic spread. Her favorite pastries wrapped in linen. A thermos of the pear blossoms tea. A mug she'd once joked was the perfect hand size . He’d remembered.

A playlist hummed softly in the background of familiar piano instrumental  melodies she couldn’t name but somehow felt like her.

One corner held a stack of well-loved books, the poetry collections she loved, novels she had edited, a few of Colin’s travel journals. They were all marked with sticky notes, tiny tabs, pen marks in the margins. He’d read them. All of them.

And in the far corner, a battered tin box. She stilled.

Her tin box.

The one she’d buried under the floorboards when they were thirteen. Filled with stickers, a broken friendship bracelet, and a note that simply said: If I ever die, give this to Colin.

Her hands trembled. The box looked untouched but newly polished. On top was a fresh envelope, her name in Colin’s handwriting. She turned to him, eyes wide, heart riotous.

He didn’t speak. Just gave her the faintest nod.

She opened it.

Inside were small, worn scraps of paper. Folded. Labeled. Each one a moment. A memory.

She took one and unfolded the paper slowly. Inside was a child’s drawing all creased and faded with time. Two stick figures sat side by side on a crooked tree branch. One had curly orange hair, a yellow scribble for a dress. The other wore a little blue jersey with a crooked smile. Between them was a giant Twix bar, split down the middle.

Penelope smiled faintly, fingers grazing the crayon lines.

Colin watched her, then said softly, “It was the barbecue, remember? Anthony and Benedict were teasing me about football and I hated it. I ran up to the treehouse to hide.”

He nudged his toe against hers. “You followed me. Sat next to me like it was the most natural thing in the world. Gave me half your Twix. That’s when I drew this right after you left. I didn’t want to forget what it felt like to be seen and not judged. You didn’t laugh at me. You didn’t try to fix me. You just let me be upset and gave me chocolate. ”

She glanced down again, and he added gently, “You said ‘I love you’ that day.”

Penelope froze.

“I remember,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do with it then. I was eleven. I didn’t understand how someone saying that could make me feel...braver.”

Penelope swallowed hard. She held the drawing like it was something sacred. There was a sticky smudge near the bottom where a bit of chocolate must have melted into the paper.

She had remembered this moment all her life how she’d whispered it and handed him the bigger half of the Twix, heart in her throat. But she never thought he had held onto it too.

She unfolded the next paper, already soft from years of being touched, folded, unfolded again. Penelope inhaled sharply. She knew this drawing. It was one of the ones she'd done in the back of her notebook, never meant for anyone else’s eyes. 

The glitter pen smeared and smudged in the corners but still full of life. A girl sat hunched on the edge of a bench, hands resting in her lap. Her head was tilted toward the boy beside her drawn with more detail than any other figure she’d ever doodled. He was smiling that lopsided grin he’d always had when he was younger. The girl’s chest was drawn with faint lines like a heart radiating light.

“It was during lunch,” Colin said gently behind her, his voice threading through memory. “Fife took your notebook and I saw him flipping through your sketches.” Colin continued. “You looked like you wanted the ground to swallow you whole.”

“I did,” Penelope whispered.

“So I punched him in the shoulder.” Colin said casually.

Penelope’s eyes widened.

“He was going to hit back,” Colin added, a wry smile tugging at his mouth, “but the teacher showed up before either of us could get suspended.”

She let out a shaky laugh. She remembered the sharp call of the teacher’s whistle, Fife muttering curses under his breath and her face burning hot with humiliation.

“But one of the pages fell,” he said. “This one. I picked it up after you left.”

Her fingers hovered over the page now, trembling.

“I kept it because…” Colin exhaled. “Because I think that’s the day I realized what it meant to be someone’s favorite story. You didn’t say it to my face but I saw the note.”

She looked up at him, eyes stinging with tears she hadn’t expected.

“I didn’t know how to say anything back,” he admitted, voice quieter now. “I was fourteen. I didn’t even know what to do with feelings like that. But I never forgot.”

Penelope unfolded the photo with a quiet inhale. It was slightly bent at the corners, the kind printed by the school photographer and distributed weeks later. It showed the three of them Eloise in the middle, grinning in her jumpsuit and combat boots. Colin stood to her left in a navy blue suit, hair unruly. He wasn’t looking at the camera, he was looking at Penelope. And Penelope wore a pale pink tulle dress. Her cheeks were flushed, caught mid-laugh as she turned slightly toward him.

Her fingers trembled slightly as she gripped the photo. She remembered that night. Remembered thinking maybe tonight he finally saw her. But when she whispered I love you for the third time, he’d gone quiet. Not cruel. Just uncertain. Like he hadn't yet caught up to the way she looked at him.

“I haven’t seen this in years,” she murmured.

“I took it from the stack in the admin office,” Colin admitted beside her. “They left the extras out for anyone who wanted one. I kept this one.”

She turned to look at him.

“Why?”

He rubbed the back of his neck, sheepish but steady. “Because it was the first time I really noticed the way you lit up when you laughed. And I didn’t want to forget that.”

The next thing she opened was a thin sheet, yellowing at the edges, folded four times. When Penelope opened it, her breath caught.

Her words. Her poem. Typed in the exact format she had read it in—under the pseudonym “L.” at an open mic night in a cramped café two blocks from Oxford’s main quad. She hadn’t known anyone in the crowd that night. Or so she thought.

She ran her fingers over the paper.

You learn to flinch with a grin
say “I’m fine” until it feels like skin,
until silence becomes a second spine.

You bloom in corners,
in hush, in caution,
in rooms where your name
is always almost spoken.

They said stay small.
But inside, you burned.

You swallowed galaxies
to keep the peace,
laughed just loud enough
to mask the breaking.

You learn to armor your heart in gold leaf
bright enough to dazzle,
thin enough to crack.

And at first, it keeps you safe.
But be careful, love.

Because someday,
that armor will rust.
And when someone finally
offers you a soft place to fall,
you won’t know how.

You deserve to be loved
in the quiet way you’ve always feared
not for your shine,
but for your shadows.

But love can’t touch you
if you keep pretending you don’t need it.

Let it hurt a little.
Let it be real.
Let it find you
before you disappear.

Penelope swallowed.

“I knew it was you,” Colin said. He was sitting beside her, eyes locked on the poem. “Even before you read the third stanza—I just knew.”

She blinked, lips parting, but no words came.

“That poem…” he trailed off, emotion tugging at his throat. “It wrecked me. In the best way. I was twenty and lost, thinking I had to be this version of myself that made sense to everyone else. But then you stood there, and you said all the things I didn’t know I needed to hear.”

Penelope blinked, still stunned he remembered it.

Colin looked down. “Everything was bad timing back then.” 

He took a breath, not looking at her. “I convinced myself that was love. That it was enough. But it wasn’t. Because when you said I love you again that party, I—” he exhaled. “I didn’t know how to hold something so real when I was drowning in something fake.”

He continued, “I had just promised to be exclusive with Marina. Everyone liked us together, so I tried to like it too. I even bought a ring.”

Penelope’s fingers twitched. Then, his voice cracked at the edges. “Then I found out Marina had been seeing someone else. And was pregnant. And suddenly all of it, everything I thought I was building just collapsed.”

He turned toward her, softer now.

“But your poem… it stayed with me. It was truth. It was you. It was the thing I read again and again when I forgot who I was. You kept me grounded, Pen. Even when you didn’t know it.”

Penelope’s heart pounded. There was only one left.

Colin looked at it for a long moment, then back at her. His voice was quiet, almost ashamed.

“That one… that was a letter I wrote for you. I never sent it. I should have but I was a coward.”

She looked at him and then, with trembling fingers, reached for the envelope.

Penelope opened it slowly, carefully, as if the paper might crumble under the weight of everything left unsaid. 

Dear Penelope,

I watched you dance barefoot across a vineyard lawn in yellow linen, sunlight kissing your shoulders while I stood across the terrace, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. Alfred kissed your temple and you laughed light and free and I knew with a kind of grief that settled deep in my bones what it meant to lose something I never truly held.

When you said it would pass, you looked at me like I should’ve known. Like I should’ve believed it too. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because standing there, with the sound of your joy echoing off the Tuscan hills and the taste of your name on my tongue, I knew I was already too late.

I should have loved you when it would have mattered. When we were still young and full of hope and possibility. I should have loved you when your laughter was quiet and uncertain, when your eyes dimmed in the middle of crowded rooms, when you waited for something, for someone who never quite arrived. I should have seen it then. That you were never background. Never invisible. Never the footnote they made you out to be. You were the whole story. And I was a coward living in the margins.

I remember you at every age, in every form, soft-spoken, sharp-tongued, afraid, radiant, bold. You loved out loud and I answered in silence. I missed it. Again and again, I missed it. And now I write this with the weight of everything I didn’t say pressing down like a second spine.

I said it too late. In front of my family, in front of the man you chose because he didn’t make you wait. I said it like a confession and a prayer, like maybe if I offered the truth at last, the universe might rewind just a little. But the world doesn’t bend for regret. It doesn’t make space for men who learn too slow.

So let this be what I leave behind: a record. A reckoning. That I loved you. That I love you still. That I will go on loving you in silence, if I must.

I don’t ask for another chance. I don’t even ask for your forgiveness. I ask only that you find peace, Pen. Real peace. Even if it never includes me. Even if I am the storm that has to pass for your sun to rise.

And if you ever wonder, yes. It was always you. It was always you. I just took too long to say it.

Yours in every way I never had the courage to be,

—Colin

Penelope could hardly breathe.

She turned, slowly, to find him standing by the window. Older now, steadier. No longer the boy who’d dismissed her love like weather. He was all grown heart and wrecked hope.

“Colin…”

He stepped forward. No nerves. No performance. Just truth.

“You have always been my constant. My courage. My heart. You saw me when I was just some idiotic, privileged boy fumbling around life and you loved me anyway.”

He swallowed. His voice cracked but didn’t waver.

“But I see you now, Penelope.”

“I see the brilliance. The strength. The fire. I see the woman who clawed her way into the world and made it listen. And I am so, so in love with her.”

Her breath hitched. Something deep inside her, some long buried ache, cracked open with the force of his words.

Then he looked at her. Just Colin Bridgerton, eyes stormy and earnest.

“I simply cannot believe that a woman with such bravery loves me,” he said quietly. “How lucky I am to stand by your side and soak up even a little bit of your light.”

His voice lowered, rough with reverence.

“If my only purpose in life is to love a woman as great as you, then I will be a fulfilled man, indeed.”

She couldn’t stop crying now. Tears rolled freely, no longer born from grief but release.

Colin with his voice shaking continued, “I’ve travelled the world and written a thousand pages. But every sentence comes back to you. And I will spend the rest of my life making sure you never doubt again that it never passes.”

It took her a long moment. Her sobs were quiet but whole. She held all the years between them in her chest and let them go. She opened her mouth, breath catching on the first syllable. “I lo—”

But Colin stepped in softly, urgently. “Let me say it first.”

His eyes didn’t waver. No performance. No panic. Just the truth stripped bare.

“I love you, Penelope Featherington. I have for a very, very long time.”

And this time, she believed him.

She moved toward him, slow and steady, like trust rebuilt. He stayed still, waiting, the way he should have done long ago.

“I never stopped,” she whispered with her voice shaking.

“I know,” he said, barely more than breath. “But now I’ll keep saying it until it’s the most obvious thing in the world.”

She stepped forward. Slowly. Tenderly. Then rested her forehead against his.

“You really said all of that for me?”

“For you,” he said. “Only ever you.”

They stood in silence, the night folding softly around them until Colin with a small nervous grin reached behind a low bench and pulled out a small cake. It was homemade, a little lopsided, with uneven frosting.

Penelope let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “You baked?”

“I tried,” he said sheepishly. “Mum and Daphne supervised.”

She shook her head, heart aching in the best way.

“I wanted this moment to have something sweet,” he added, stepping closer between them. “Because you’ve waited so long for someone to choose you without hesitation.”

He placed it between them, lit the candle, and whispered, “Make a wish.”

But she didn’t need to. She had everything she wanted, standing right in front of her.

Then he looked at her, all softness and sincerity.

“So…Penelope Featherington, will you be my girlfriend?”

She blinked, stunned by the simplicity of it. After everything, he still made it feel new.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

And just as the word left her lips, the clock struck twelve.

Colin smiled, eyes bright. “Happy birthday, Pen.”

He leaned in and kissed her. Soft at first. Gentle and anchored in awe. Then deeper, like a promise sealed with breath. Like a man who had found his home at last. 

And so, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday night, under a string of fairy lights in a restored childhood treehouse just outside Mayfair, Colin Bridgerton kissed Penelope Featherington.

And it was glorious.