"Isn't it? You're sacrificing everything because of me. Your position, your family, your future. Because you love me."
"Because I love you. Yes. And I won't apologise for that."
"I'm not asking you to apologise. I'm asking you to stop." She felt tears burning in her eyes and blinked them back fiercely. "I'm asking you to think about what you're doing. Really think about it. Not just today, when everything feels possible, and love seems like enough. But twenty years from now. Thirty years. Fifty."
"I have thought about it. I've done nothing but think about it for weeks."
"And you honestly believe that in fifty years, you won't regret this? That you won't look at everything you gave up and wonder if it was worth it?"
"I know I won't."
"How? How can you possibly know that?"
"Because I know what my life was like before you." His voice was fierce now, almost angry. "I know what it felt like to wake up every morning with nothing to look forward to. I know what it felt like to go through the motions of living without actually being alive. I spent thirty years being exactly what my family wanted me to be, and it was killing me. Slowly, quietly, but killing me all the same."
"Frederick…"
"You saved me. Don't you understand that? You looked at me and saw something worth knowing, something worth wanting, when everyone else just saw a title and a fortune. You made me want to be better. To be more. To be human." He stepped toward her again, and this time she didn't retreat. "I'm not sacrificing anything for you. I'm gaining everything. You are my future, Lydia. The only future I want."
The tears were falling now, hot and wet on her cheeks. She couldn't stop them.
"I can't be your future," she whispered. "I can't be responsible for everything you're losing."
"You're not responsible. I'm making this choice freely. Gladly."
"But that's exactly the problem." She forced herself to look at him, to see the love and confusion and dawning fear in his eyes. "You're so blinded by love that you can't see what you're doing. You're walking into a fire, Frederick. And I can't just stand here and watch you burn."
"I'm not…"
"Your mother did the same thing." The words came out before she could stop them. "Helena told me. She loved someone else, a scholar, a man who made her laugh, and she was going to run away with him. But she gave him up. She married your father instead, and she spent the rest of her short life being miserable."
Frederick went very still.
"Helena told you about my mother?"
"She told me everything. How your mother loved someone else. How she sacrificed that love for duty. How she died in this cold house, worn out from trying to be something she wasn't." Lydia's voice was shaking. "And she told me that if I really loved you, I would do the same thing. Give you up. Set you free. I would not let you lose anything, and I would not try to be something that I am not."
"That's…..That's manipulation. Helena is manipulating you."
"Is she? Or is she telling me the truth that I didn't want to hear?" Lydia wiped at her tears with the back of her hand. "Your mother chose duty over love, and it destroyed her. But at least she gave your father an heir. At least she fulfilled her obligations to the family. At least she didn't burn everything down on her way out."
"I don't care about heirs. I don't care about obligations."
"You should. You're a duke, Frederick. You have responsibilities. People who depend on you—tenants, servants, everyone whose livelihood is tied to this estate. And you're going to throw all of that away because of me."
"I'm not throwing it away. I'm just…"
"You're just choosing love over duty. The way your mother didn't." Lydia took a deep breath. "And maybe that's the right choice. Maybe Helena is wrong, and Boggins is right, and love really is worth more than all the propriety in the world. But I can't know that. Not for certain. And neither can you."
"Lydia…"
"What I do know is that I can't be the reason you lose everything. I can't wake up every morning wondering if today is the day you start to regret it. I can't spend the rest of my life waiting for you to realise that you made a mistake."
"I won't regret it. I won't…"
"You don't know that. You can't know that. And I…" Her voice broke. "I love you too much to watch you destroy yourself for me."
The words hung in the air between them, terrible and true.
