“How are you, really?” Father asks.
Gwen blinks. “I’m fine.”
“I doubt that,” Father says softly.
Gwen sinks back against her chair, the ache of it charging back up her chest. “I had hoped—” She pauses. Had hoped what, exactly?
“You thought there was still a chance Beth might abandon her match, her security, her safety, and come live with you?” he asks gently.
Gwen looks over, surprised. “I—no, no, I... didn’t,” she argues, her voice brittle.
She knows that won’t happen. That it can’t. It’s why they schemed and tried and pushed. But Beth can’t just walk away from the life the Ashmonds can give her. Gwen knows that. She’s cried about it enough.
“I hoped so, when I was your age,” Father says, and Gwen meets his eyes, surprised. “Thought that at the eleventh hour Cordelia would give up her advantage and come back to me,marry me and live a small but happy life. I believed it might happen right up until the church bells rang. And it broke me.”
Gwen watches as he regards her, paternal and protective and experienced. “What did you do?” Gwen asks, feeling her heart breaking all over for him and herself.
“I drank, and I partied, and I got a good girl in trouble, and got you,” he says steadily.
Gwen swallows hard. She thought he didn’t know she had heard him and Mrs. Gilpe—hoped he’d thought that she’d just been sick. She hasn’t had the heart to mention it.
“And I would do it all over again to get you,” he says firmly, reaching out to take her hand. “But I can’t pretend it was easy or how I wanted to bring you into the world. And your mother, rest her soul—you can do better than me, Gwen. Find a good man, or hell, a good woman who can stay with you. We can go to Paris. I hear from friends it’s much more... open about these things right now.”
Gwen blinks. He—he would take her to Paris, to meet a nice woman—“But what about the title?”
“We can worry about that later,” Father says, shrugging like it’s no longer important. “If I can push this vote through, I don’t really give a damn what happens after.”
“And you wouldn’t... mind? If I never married?”
“I just want you to be happy,” he says simply.
Gwen sits for a moment, soaking that in. Words she’s wanted to hear for ages—she can stand down, she can let go of the season, she can simply be herself.
But what does it matter if it won’t be with Beth?
“What about you?” she asks, seeing one shimmering last chance.
“What about me?”
“If you don’t care, after this vote—if it doesn’t matter—why can’t you be happy too?”
Father snorts. “What do you mean, Gwennie?”
Gwen summons the last dregs of her courage. Beth gave it her all; Gwen has to at least try. “Ask Lady Demeroven for her hand. Take your own happiness. And who knows, you could get an heir—a planned one. And even if you don’t—”
“Gwen—”
“She’s miserable too. She hates the Ashmonds, and Beth says it’s like watching her submit to her father all over again. Can’t we—can’t you try, just once more? Ask again.”
The ease falls from his face, that guarded, aloof expression she so hates settling over him. It’s the look he wears at balls. The way he looks with women. Detached and poised and uncaring.
“You may be a glutton for punishment, but I am not,” he says stiffly.
“What?”
“The teas with Meredith? Do you think you’ve been subtle?”
Gwen leans back, surprised and defensive but with no way to argue it. “I—”
