It doesn't matter. What matters is what I need to say.
I made a mistake. The worst mistake of my life. And I've spent ten years paying for it—not in any external way, but in the currency of regret that accumulates daily in a heart that has forgotten how to feel.
I loved someone once. Truly loved him, with all the passion and madness that love entails. He was a scholar, brilliant, kind, full of dreams that made the world seem larger and brighter. We were going to run away together. We had plans, a future we'd imagined in whispered conversations and stolen moments.
But my family found out. My father, my sister Helena, and everyone who was supposed to love me; they made it clear that if I chose him, I would be choosing exile. Poverty. Shame.
And I was afraid. So terribly, pathetically afraid.
So I gave him up. I married the man my family had chosen for me, a duke, cold and distant and utterly incapable of love. I came to live in this beautiful, empty house, and I tried to be what everyone expected.
I failed. Of course, I failed. You cannot build a life on the ashes of the one you destroyed.
My husband never loved me. My sister, who pushed me into this marriage, never understood why I couldn't simply accept my good fortune. And my son, my beautiful boy, who deserved so much better, grew up watching his mother fade away, and learned that love was something to be feared rather than cherished.
I'm writing this because I know I'm dying. The fever they say is killing me is just an excuse; I've been dying for years, from the inside out. The body is simply catching up to the spirit.
But before I go, I need to say this to someone. Anyone.
If you ever have the chance to choose love, real love, the kind that makes you feel alive, choose it. Don't let fear make your decision for you. Don't let other people's expectations shape your life.
I gave up the man I loved because I thought I was being sensible. Being responsible. Being a good daughter and a proper lady.
I was wrong. I was so terribly, devastatingly wrong.
Love is not madness. Love is the only sanity in a world determined to crush the life out of us. And if you are lucky enough to find it, if someone looks at you and sees the person you really are, not the person others expect you to be, hold on to them with everything you have.
Don't make my mistake.
Don't spend your life writing letters that no one will ever read, wishing you had been braver.
Choose love. Choose life. Choose to be happy, even if the world tells you that happiness is not for people like you.
You deserve it. We all deserve it.
With all the regret in my heart,Catherine.
Frederick read the letter three times.
The first time, the words blurred together, his eyes too full of tears to see clearly. His mother's voice, a voice he had never really heard, not in the way a child should hear their mother, echoed through the careful handwriting. She had been real. She had been alive. She had loved someone with all the passion and despair that love could hold.
And she had died regretting the choice she'd been forced to make.
The second time, he forced himself to go slowly, to absorb each sentence, to feel the weight of his mother's regret. She had loved a scholar. A man who made her laugh. A man who saw her as Catherine, not as Lady Catherine, not as a pawn in someone else's game.
She was going to run away with him. To escape the cold, empty life that was waiting for her.
And Helena had stopped her.
The third time, he understood.
His mother had not chosen duty. She had chosen fear—not her own fear, but the fear of others. The fear of her father, who couldn't imagine a daughter who lived for herself. The fear of Helena, who had spent her whole life believing that propriety was more important than happiness. The fear of a world that couldn't accept love unless it came wrapped in appropriate packaging.
Don't let fear make your decision for you.
That was what Lydia had done. She had looked at their love and seen danger instead of possibility. She had listened to Helena's poison and believed that letting go was kindness.
But it wasn't kindness. It was fear wearing the mask of nobility.
