Lucius ticked off another day in his mental calendar, not sure if he should laugh or cry at the fact that he had now successfully eluded his wife for precisely ten days. On the one hand, this allowed him to put off the conversation he’d been dreading since the engagement was first announced. On the other hand, avoiding her took a significant amount of time and energy and he knew, rationally, that he was really only delaying the inevitable.
He’d taken to sleeping in various guest bedrooms, and the house elves made sure that he got a quick breakfast tray before heading off to work so that he didn’t have to pass by the kitchen or the dining room. They’d also, at his request, taken to warning him whenever Narcissa left the house and returned so that Lucius had ample time to hide or shut himself in his father’s old office under the pretense of getting paperwork done.
At that moment, though, he was out in the giant greenhouse, surrounded by newly-blooming flowers, having returned not long ago from a particularly stressful meeting with a foreign delegate. He’d stripped down to his shirtsleeves and rolled them up to his elbows, and was going through a series of meditative stretches that served to calm his racing heart and ease him into several ballet positions. It was always nice to be able to do this in the filtered sunlight through the greenhouse panes, but he never would have dreamed of it until his mother finally left the country a week ago.
He was just rising onto the balls of his feet when he heart a rustling behind him, startling him so much that he fell from the rise and half-collapsed into the nearby tableset.
It was Narcissa. Merlin, it was Narcissa, looking beautiful and nothing like the rigidly-composed woman he’d spent their courtship with.
A lump rose in his throat, and he shakily righted himself, automatically spinning the Malfoy signet ring around and around his finger.
“Narcissa- I,” he began. “Hello.”
