“What youclaimedyou wanted. After what I heard today, it doesn’t sound like you even want her to be married. Even she said that you’re making it hard on her. She said you need to back away from your concerns and allow her to enjoy her happiness. And this can’t be about the man she married, because he seems like the most harmless person alive.”
Susan sighed. “There’s no chance you’re going to let this go, is there?”
“I have a right to know, Susan. I married you because you wanted her to have this, and now you’re saying you don’t want that at all.”
“I’m not lying,” she said. “It just… it isn’t simple.”
“Well, I’ve gathered that.”
She sighed. “Of course I wanted Marina to marry,” she said. “You’re right about Gilbert. He seems like a good man. And the two of them really care for one another, and I want them to have that. What kind of sister would I be if I felt any differently?”
“But?” he prompted.
“But I don’t know how much I can really trust that situation,” she confessed. “I don’t know if I can count on Gilbert to take care of her—to go on loving her the way she deserves to be loved.”
“You just said you thought he was a good man,” Norman pointed out. “And it’s clear that he does care for her deeply. I saw the way he was looking at her over breakfast today. She means the world to him. If I had a sister, I would want to see her married to someone who looked at her like that.”
“Yes,” Susan agreed. “But today is the very first day of their marriage. There is plenty of time for things to sour between them.”
“What makes you think that’s going to happen?” he challenged.
“It’s not that I think itisgoing to happen,” she said. “I just know that it could.”
“And that’s why your sister told you to stop worrying about her,” Norman concluded. “It bothers her that you would assume the worst on the very first day of her marriage.”
Susan bristled. “I’m more realistic than she is.”
“You think that’s realism? Assuming that things are going to go bad? Is that what you think will happen for the two of us as well?”
“It’s entirely different,” Susan said. “You and I don’t care about one another in that way. There’s nothing that could get ruined between us. The only thing I hope for from you is that you don’t turn violent with me—and no, I don’t believe you will, because that doesn’t seem to be in your temperament.”
His jaw worked. “Of course I wouldn’t be violent toward you,” he said at length. “I don’t know why you would even think of such a thing.”
“It happens,” Susan said. “It happened to my sister.”
Norman frowned. “You’re not saying this man has been violent with your sister already?” He sat up a little straighter.
Susan felt a sudden rush of warmth at his reaction.
He was giving her a hard time about all this, but at the mere suggestion that someone had been cruel to Marina, he had reacted defensively.
He does understand.
He thought she was overreacting, but that was because he didn’t understandwhyshe was reacting.
And it was that realization that made her feel, at last, that she could tell him the truth.
“No,” she said quietly. “Not Marina. My other sister, Leah.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I hadn’t realized that you had another sister,” he said.
“She was married a few years ago. The first of us to marry,” Susan said. “And her husband, George—the Earl of Tropshire—he was cruel to her. At first, everything seemed perfectly fine. He was sweet. He courted her, said all the right things, and Leah was enamored of him. Everyone was excited the day they said their vows. I was the only one who had any inkling that something might be wrong—but everyone told me that I was being silly. Leah sat with me and held my hand and reassured me. She told me that it made sense for me to be fearful of marriage after my parents’ marriage dissolved the way it did, but that things would be different for her. That she and George really loved one another.”
“So what happened then?” Norman asked quietly.
Susan sighed. How long had it been since she had said any of this aloud?
“He was never a good man,” she said. “As soon as he had Leah in his home, he changed, He gambled away her dowry. He was cruel to her and refused to let her come home to visit us. He…” She swallowed. “He forced her to have his child.”
