“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said automatically, and even as the word left her mouth, she knew it rang false.
Edward did not answer at once.
He turned away from the bed and paced the length of the room, once, then again. The sound of his boots against the floor seemed too loud in the small space, each step tightening something in her chest.
When he stopped near the window, his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders were rigid with restraint.
“You are not,” he said at last. “And you have lied to me.”
The accusation was quiet.
It cut all the same.
Charlotte swallowed. Exhaustion pressed against her bones, deep and unrelenting, leaving no strength for careful half-truthsor practiced composure. Whatever armor she had worn until now had cracked in the fall, splintered beyond repair.
“I am sorry,” she said softly. “For the name. For the deception.” Her fingers curled into the coverlet. “I never intended to mislead you. I only—”
“You allowed me to believe you were someone you are not,” he said, still facing the window.
The words were precise. Controlled. Far more devastating than anger would have been.
Her throat tightened. “Yes.”
He turned then. His gaze snapped to her, sharp and searching, as though he could see through every word straight to the truth beneath.
“I did not wish you to believe me someone else,” she said quietly, before he could speak again. “Not in the way you mean.”
He waited.
“I could not come here as Charlotte Westbrook,” she continued, voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. “That name belonged to a girl with parents. With a home. With expectationsand protection.” Her breath caught. “She did not survive the accident.”
Something flickered in his expression—not pity, but recognition.
“When everything was taken from me,” she said, “I had to become someone who could endure it. Someone who could work. Who could stand alone. Charlotte Fenton was not a deception. She was … a necessity.”
Silence followed, heavy and unyielding.
“I have been honest in everything else,” she pressed on, softer now. “With Julian. With you. I did not invent affection where there was none.” Her voice faltered despite her restraint. “My feelings—”
She stopped herself.
The word hovered between them, unspoken and perilous, a truth neither of them could afford to name.
Edward studied her for a long moment, as though recalibrating something he had believed fixed. The anger he might have felt never quite surfaced. What replaced it was more unsettling.
It was restraint. Understanding.
“At some point,” he said slowly, “we all require second chances.”
Hope flared—reckless, unwanted, painful in its intensity. Her heart leaped before she could stop it, clinging to the word as though it were an offered hand.
Then he extinguished it.
“You will prepare to leave.”
The words hollowed her.
