“Are you really going to pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Catherine—”
“Just wake up tomorrow and start a list of other suitors? Send me off on more outings, like everything is just as it was this morning?”
Mother finally meets her eyes and Catherine physically steps back. It’s a look she’s never seen before. Like she’s searching Catherine for the woman she knew, when Catherine’s still standing there, exactly the same person she was before the tea.
“What did I miss?” Father asks, looking between them.
Catherine opens her mouth, unsure of how to face it—how to tell him—how to risk him looking at her the way Mother is now.
Mother shakes her head. “I need to speak with your father before we discuss this as a family,” she says, her tone final. It almost feels like a scolding.
“It’s about me, shouldn’t—”
“Let me do this, Catherine. Please,” Mother says.
Herpleasefeels like a physical blow.
Biting at her lip, Catherine watches with dread as Mother guides her confused father up the stairs. She has to support him now, his muscles tired from the tea—from playing host. From saving her so gamely from a life of mediocrity.
When they reach the landing, Father looks down at her and smiles.
Thank you, Catherine mouths. If he feels like it seems Mother does, it may be her last opportunity to say it.
He winks at her, and then they’re gone, moving slowly up the next staircase.
What if he never smiles at her like that again? What if everything is different from this moment on? What if they never look at her the same way ever again?
She didn’t think about the aftermath, not like this. She never let herself. Forced herself to believe that her parents could only accept her. That it would be hard at first, of course, but it was possible. It was possible they’d help her and keep loving her exactly as they always have.
She just wanted... she justwanted.
She stands there, trembling, trying not to cry, and MissTeit comes out of the servants’ hallway, wringing her hands.
“Shall I help you undress?” she asks. “We ought to get to that stain.”
Catherine looks down at her wine-soaked dress. She’d almost forgotten. Everything started from that stain. From asking Amalie for help. From daring to wonder if there was a different way to live her life—a way that gave her Rosalie, and Christopher, and a bigger, wider, better world than the one she’s always been told to expect.
She doesn’t know if she can stay in this dress for another minute.
“Here. Spin,” MissTeit says softly.
Catherine realizes then that her chest is heaving and she’s sucking in scant air. MissTeit quickly undoes the laces and helps lift the dress and her petticoat over her head.
The moment the fabric clears her hair, Catherine whispers a choked “Thank you.”
Then she’s running full tilt up all the staircases, past the sitting room, past her parents’ floor, until she hurtles into her room, slamming herself into safe, secluded peace.
It’s started raining, water streaking down the window. How fitting. If this were one of her novels...
Catherine growls and hurls herself onto the window seat.She curls up in her wine-soaked chemise and her stays, arms around her knees, staring out at the rain.
Rosalie isn’t going to climb into her window in a pair of riding pants and whisk her away to live happily off somewhere. Her parents aren’t going to easily turn the other cheek. Society isn’t going to magically accept Catherine and Rosalie together. There isn’t a fairy-tale ending.
It didn’t all have to be tonight. They didn’thaveto upend everything they’ve ever known all at once. It would have been easier to just keep... pretending. Fend off suitors and steal time together.
But as Catherine watches a raindrop slide down the window, she knows she doesn’t really want to live a half-life like that. Always stealing time, stealing moments, stealing each other.
