“I’m sorry,” he said again into the darkness. “For exposing you to that. For asking you to endure their poison while smiling as though nothing was wrong.”
“You called her your daughter.”
Edmund’s eyes snapped open. Isadora sat across from him in shadows, but he could hear something in her voice he couldn’t name.
“What?”
“When you defended us. I heard you through the study door.” She leaned forward slightly, and lamplight from outside caught her face. “You called Lillian your daughter. Not your ward. Your daughter.”
Edmund swallowed hard. “She is. In every way that matters.”
“Then why—” Isadora stopped, shaking her head. “Why do you treat her like she’s made of spun glass? Why do you keep her locked away when you’re willing to claim her as yours in front of the very people whose opinions you’ve been so desperate to control?”
The question struck at truths Edmund had been avoiding since Lillian’s arrival. “Because claiming her is easy. Knowing how to actually be what she needs—that’s the impossible part.”
Silence settled between them, broken only by the crunch of wheels through snow and the jingle of harness. Outside, darkness had swallowed the landscape completely, leaving them isolated in their small bubble of lamplight.
“You defended me too,” Isadora said finally. “I heard that part as well. ‘My wife,’ you said. As though you actually?—”
She stopped, but Edmund heard what she wasn’t saying. As though you actually cared. As though I was more than just a practical arrangement.
“You are my wife,” he said quietly. “Whatever else is true or false between us, that much is real.”
“Is it?” Her voice carried challenge he recognized. “Because three days ago you made it abundantly clear that our marriage was nothing more than?—”
“I was wrong.”
The admission escaped before wisdom could stop it. Edmund sat forward, close enough now to see her eyes widen with surprise in the lamplight’s glow.
“I was wrong,” he repeated, the words coming easier now that he’d started. “You are… my wife. My family.”
Isadora’s breath caught audibly. “Edmund?—”
“I will not pretend to be some great… romantic, but… I will not have anyone or anything belonging to me or my family insulted in that manner.”
“Belonging?”
Isadora’s voice was soft. Edmund avoided her piercing gaze. How could he tell her that he had come to care for her more than he expected to? The carriage swayed as they rounded a corner. Outside, snow had begun to fall again—thick flakes that would soon bury the roads and trap them at Rothwell Abbey together.
“You are my wife. And when I defend you as my wife,” Edmund said quietly, “I mean it. You are… a mother to my ward, you are my responsibility and my family now. And as far as I can, I swear to protect…”
His voice caught at the look in her eye and he swallowed with difficulty.
“I will protect you. And your reputation.”
Isadora was crying—silent tears tracking down her cheeks in the lamplight. Edmund reached across the space between them, brushing moisture away with his thumb in a gesture more tender than he’d known he was capable of.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered. “Please. I do not wish to make you cry.”
“Then don’t say things like that when we’re trapped in a carriage and I can’t—” She stopped, shaking her head. “This is impossible. All of it.”
“I know.”
“We can’t just?—”
“I know that too.”
But he didn’t pull his hand away, and she didn’t move back. They sat like that as the carriage carried them through falling snow toward home, connected by touch that said everything they weren’t quite ready to speak aloud.
