“But it did,” she pressed. “And then you apologized. You said it would never happen again. Do you regret it?”
“Yes,” he said at once.
The answer was honest. It was also incomplete. She flinched, though she tried to hide it.
“Then why are we doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Marrying one another,” she said. “Standing in that church while everyone around us seems determined to pull us apart. Your grandmother. Sylvia. Even my own doubts.”
He met her gaze.
“You are not innocent in that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have been trying to sabotage this engagement since the moment it was announced,” he said. “You admit it freely. You provoke. You resist. You test the limits at every opportunity.”
“Because I do not know whether it is right,” she said. “Because I do not know whether you even want this.”
“And yet you demand certainty from me,” he replied. “While doing everything in your power to undo it.”
“So tell me. If everyone else wishes us apart, if they whisper and scheme and glare, does any of it matter?”
“It does not,” he said immediately.
She stopped.
“Whatever others think or do,” George continued, “if two people choose to remain together, nothing can come between them. Not family, not expectation, not resentment.”
Her breath caught. She looked at him as though he had said something dangerous.
“And do we choose that?”
The question landed exactly where she meant it to. George felt it then, the pull he had been resisting all evening. The urge to step forward. To answer honestly. To tell her that he had been thinking of her far more than was sensible, that he had kissed her because restraint had failed him, not because affection had.
He did not move.
“I cannot answer that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because wanting is not the same as choosing,” he replied. “And I do not make promises I am not certain I can keep.”
Silence stretched between them. Cassandra nodded once, as though steadying herself.
“Then that is my answer.”
She turned toward the door, and George did not stop her. He listened to her footsteps fade down the corridor, each one a reminder of what he had refused to say. Only when she was gone did he allow himself to sit heavily on the edge of the bed, one hand pressed to his face.
He had avoided lying, but he suspected that withholding the truth might wound her just as deeply.
George found Philippa in the blue sitting room the next morning, curled into the corner of the sofa with a book she was very clearly not reading. She looked up at once when he entered.
“You should be resting,” he said.
“I am resting. I am simply doing it while being observant.”
