It seemed the duke had already learned what it had taken Senlin too long to discover: Intimacy was not about maintaining the idealistic charade of courtship; it was about embracing and adoring the flaws, the very things that the headmaster of Isaugh had never been quite able to admit in himself. The Mermaid’s train song to the children rang again in his ears: “It’s perfectly all right not to be perfect. A chip or a crack can be precious, too.”
