She crossed to the mirror, smoothing her hair with slightly trembling fingers and arranging her features into something resembling calm. The woman who stared back still looked disheveled and wild, but at least the evidence of her distress had been contained.
Alice took a breath, pressed her hands briefly to her stomach to still its churning, and moved toward the door.
The man standing in the corridor was not who Alice expected, not a maid come to collect laundry, not Clara with questions about the evening's entertainment, but Samuel Baldwin, Viscount Crewe, holding a leather-bound volume as if it were a diplomatic offering. His expression was a mask ofcarefully maintained neutrality that fooled neither of them.
"Lord Crewe." Her voice emerged with surprising steadiness, though her heart had begun an entirely new rhythm, faster, less controlled, touched with the panic of a woman caught in a private moment of vulnerability.
"Lady Alice." He inclined his head, the gesture formal as always, but his grey eyes began their assessment, moving from her face to the room beyond, taking in details with an uncomfortable precision she recognized. "Forgive the intrusion. You left this in the library, and I thought?—"
He stopped.
Alice watched his gaze find the torn paper scattered across the carpet, the cream-colored fragments lying like accusations among the Persian patterns. She noticed his expression shift, the careful neutrality cracking, something else surfacing beneath it. Concern, perhaps. Or its more cautious cousin, caution.
"I thought you might want it returned," he said, but his words faded into the silence between them.
"How thoughtful." Alice stepped back, allowing him to enter despite her instincts urging her to close the door and protect her dignity. "Please, come in."
He hesitated at the threshold, a brief pause, butshe recognized the internal debate playing out behind his composed features. Propriety demanded he leave. Yet something unnamed drew him forward.
He entered.
The sitting area of her bedroom occupied a corner near the windows, furnished with a small writing desk and two chairs upholstered in faded rose silk. Samuel placed the book, now recognized as the collection of Byron she had been reading and left behind in her haste that morning, on the edge of the desk with care, as if it required concentration.
Alice used the moment to compose herself. She pressed a hand to her cheek, checking for dampness, and found none. She arranged her features into something resembling calm, summoning the bright smile she had maintained through five Seasons of social navigation.
The smile felt brittle, a mask that no longer fit properly.
"You needn't have troubled yourself," she said, gesturing at the book. "I would have retrieved it eventually."
"It was no trouble." His voice turned formal and clipped, the tone of a man recognizing danger and attempting to retreat. He stepped toward the door. "I should leave you to your?—"
He halted. Something in her expression caught him, halting the careful withdrawal he had intended.
Alice was unaware of what her face revealed. All she knew was that she could not maintain her performance, could not summon the wit that served as her armor, could not pretend to be anything other than what she was. A woman amid the ruins of her mother's expectations, unsure whether to scream, weep, or simply sink to the floor and surrender.
"Lady Alice." His voice softened, stripped of its defensive formality. "Are you well?"
The question was simple. The answer was complicated.
"Perfectly well," she replied, her words sounding hollow even to her own ears. "Merely engaged in some light correspondence. Nothing of consequence."
His gaze drifted to the torn paper scattered across the carpet. When he looked back at her, his grey eyes held something that might have been understanding.
"Light correspondence," he repeated.
"Yes." She attempted another smile, but it faltered. "My mother writes with considerable enthusiasm."
Silence stretched between them, laden with everything she could not say and everything heseemed unwilling to ask. Alice felt its weight pressing down on her chest, compressing her lungs until breathing became an effort.
"Do you believe in forever, Lord Crewe?"
The question slipped out before she could stop it, raw and unguarded, unlike her usual clever observations. She watched his expression shift, surprise surfacing and then submerging as he considered the question with the careful thoroughness he applied to everything.
"I don't know," he said finally. "I used to think I did."
"And now?"
"Now I'm uncertain about many things I once considered settled."
