It should have been flattering. It should have been the most romantic thing she'd ever heard.
Instead, it terrified her.
Because Helena was right about one thing: Frederick didn't know what he was giving up. He'd never been without his position, his influence, his place in the world. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to be truly powerless; to be shut out, whispered about, dismissed by everyone who had once deferred to him.
By the fifth year, he'll have children. Your children. And he'll watch them grow up in a world that refuses to accept them fully.
Their children. Little faces with his eyes and her stubbornness, growing up in the shadow of a scandal that wasn't their fault.
In the village, they would be the duke's children; set apart, never quite belonging to the world of ordinary folk. In society, they would be the blacksmith's grandchildren; tolerated, perhaps, but never truly accepted.
Belonging nowhere. Welcome nowhere.
Too noble for the village, too common for society.
Lydia moved back into the forge, her movements slow and mechanical. The fire had burned low in her distraction; she rebuilt it without really seeing what she was doing. Her hands knew the motions, had known them for fifteen years, but her mind was elsewhere.
She thought about her own parents. About her mother, Eleanor Ashworth, who had given up everything to marry a blacksmith. Who had never regretted it, according to Thomas. Who had been happy, genuinely happy, until the fever took her.
But Eleanor had moved down the social ladder. She had simplified her life, not complicated someone else's. That was different.
Wasn't it?
She was dead within ten years. Fever, they said, but I always thought it was more than that.
Helena's sister. Frederick’s mother. A woman who had given up love for duty married a man she didn't love, and died before her son could even remember her properly.
That was the other path. The path Helena was offering; the path of sacrifice, of letting go, of giving Frederick back to the world that had always claimed him.
But that path had destroyed Frederick’s mother. It had left her hollow and exhausted, wearing herself out against the cold walls of a life she'd never chosen.
How was that better? How was any of this better?
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is let him go.
Lydia picked up her hammer. Set it down again.
She didn't know what was kind anymore. She didn't know what love meant, or duty, or sacrifice. She didn't know anything except that she was tired; tired of thinking, tired of worrying, tired of carrying a weight she'd never asked to carry.
She wanted to go back to before. Before the harvest fair, before the storm, before a duke had walked into her life and changed everything. She wanted to be the simple blacksmith's niece again, with simple problems and simple solutions.
But there was no going back. There never was.
Consider what I've said.
She was considering. That was the problem. She couldn't stop considering.
She tried to work.
She picked up her hammer, positioned the iron on the anvil, and struck it with the familiar rhythm that had always brought her peace.
It didn't help.
Helena's words circled in her mind like vultures, picking at every certainty she'd tried to build.
He would give up everything for you.
She knew it was true. She had known it since the cottage, since the storm, since he'd looked at her with those grey-blue eyes and said he couldn't stop thinking about her.
