Daria knew he was.
He had said as much.
He had said as much.
Unlike the night before, he had shown Daria how much he desired her—not only with his body, but this time with his words. And she believed him.
She also knew that club business came first.
She was not resentful. Certainly not angry.
A wistful smile hovered on her lips. How tragic for her clever husband. The world had decided he was a shallow rake. Why, tragically, even his dearest friends—and one friend’s wife—believed it.
But shallow rakes did not build businesses. They did not pour hours, labor, and quiet devotion into such ventures. Nor were they wounded—deeply so—when a wife assumed them faithless.
Daria traced her finger over the silver-threaded pattern on the square before her.
He had the world fooled.
He had fooled her, too.
Her gaze caught on a single loosened thread in the fabric. Distractedly, she tried to pinch it between her nails.
Why maintain a façade? Unless he did not realize he wore one at all.
She caught the hair-thin strand, tugged—and lost it.
Daria sighed.
That, she thought, was among her greatest disappointments. Not in Gregory. In herself.
For she, too, was more than the world believed her to be.
A strange, awkward lady, fond of black and disinclined toward people.
And still—so much more.
She did not have a disinterest in people. She had a particular interest in sharing her life with therightpeople.
In the greatest of twists, she had married Gregory believing he would never—and could never—fall into that latter category.
And what did it mean for her heart to learn he was not the coldhearted rake she had taken him for? The man everyone took him to be.
Abandoning the silver strand, Daria rolled onto her back and stared at the mural above Gregory’s grand bed.
She went utterly still.
Motionless, she ran her eyes over the imagery.
Her heart stopped and then sped into a wild rhythm.
She’d spent so much time here wallowing. Buried inside her own head, she’d missed even more. Correcting another grave mistake, she scrambled onto her knees. Falling onto her haunches, Daria took in every detail of the vibrant masterpiece overhead. The lone woman amidst four kneeling men were portrayed not in forbidden acts like the paintings she’d averted her eyes when passing through the halls earlier. The frieze-like Arcadian pastoral portrayed shepherds gathered around a tomb, a rendering of time’s passage. A transient point where joy existed in death’s wake. The small Latin letters marked upon the grave were too hard to see, but they were ones she’d already committed to memory when she’d first laid eyes upon it.
Needing to get closer, Daria got herself carefully to her feet. Slowly so as to not lose her balance on the feathery soft surface, she tilted her neck as far as it would bend to better take in the artwork centered above her husband’s rooms.
“Et in Arcadia ego,” she whispered.
Even in Arcadia, there am I.
