Isobel had tried to tell him that once. Not in words, but in the way she looked at him when he spoke of it with such certainty.
Andrew exhaled slowly. The loss still hurt. It would for some time.
But as he stood amid the wreckage, one truth pressed itself upon him with quiet insistence:
He had nearly lost something far more irreplaceable, and only now understood the difference.
Thirty
"Miss Leyton is asking for you again."
Isobel looked up from the book she'd been pretending to read, the same page she'd been staring at for the past hour. Mrs. Hartwell, the housekeeper, stood in the doorway of the drawing room, her expression sympathetic.
"Tell her I'll be up shortly."
"She says it's urgent, Your Grace. Something about her embroidery pattern."
Despite everything, Isobel felt her lips twitch. Joan's emergencies were rarely actual emergencies. "I'll go now."
She climbed the stairs slowly, her body feeling heavier with each step. Four days. It had been four days since she'd left Foxdrey House, and each day felt longer than the last.
She'd expected, hoped, that Andrew would come after her immediately. That he'd realize his mistake and show up at her father's door, ready to fight for their marriage.
But he hadn't come.
And with each passing day, a small voice in her head grew louder, insisting that perhaps he never would. That perhaps she'd been wrong about him. That perhaps the Mayfair Fox really had been all he was, and without it, there was nothing left worth fighting for.
Joan's room was bright with afternoon sunlight, her sister sitting by the window with her embroidery hoop in her lap. But the moment Isobel entered, Joan set it aside.
"There's no emergency with your embroidery, is there?" Isobel asked.
"No." Joan patted the seat beside her. "I needed to talk to you. Really talk."
Isobel sank into the chair, suddenly exhausted. "I'm fine, Joan."
"You're not." Joan took her hand. "You've barely eaten. You're not sleeping. You jump every time there's a knock at the door. This isn't fine, Isobel."
"What do you want me to say?" Isobel pulled her hand away, standing and pacing to the window. "That I'm waiting for myhusband to come for me? That every morning I wake up thinking this will be the day? That every night I go to bed disappointed?"
"Do you still believe he will come?"
The question hung in the air.
Did she still believe?
"I don't know," Isobel admitted quietly. "Part of me does.”
She pressed her forehead against the cool glass. “But part of me doesn’t. He hasn't come, Joan. It's been more than a week, and he hasn't even sent a note. What am I supposed to think?"
"That he's working through the hardest thing he's ever had to face." Joan stood, moving to her sister. "That he's fighting demons you can't see. That he loves you enough to want to be whole before he comes back."
"Or that he doesn't love me enough to fight for us." She fought back tears. "Maybe I made it too easy for him. Maybe by leaving, I just gave him an excuse to let me go."
"Isobel."
A knock at the door interrupted them. Mrs. Hartwell appeared again, slightly breathless.
"Your Grace, there's—there's a visitor. For you."
