“Is that what I am to you? A duty?”
The question struck more deeply than she had anticipated. She turned to face him, and the raw anguish in his eyes very nearly undid her resolve.
Tell him, some part of her urged.Tell him what you heard. Give him the chance to explain.
Yet to explain would be to confess that she had overheard him. It would mean admitting that his words had wounded her—and that admission would betray how deeply she had cared. It would mean rendering herself vulnerable once more, when vulnerability had so often been rewarded with devastation.
“You are my husband,” she said with measured care. “That remains unchanged.”
“But something has changed. Something you will not name, and I do not know how to—” His hands clenched at his sides. “I do not know how to reach you. You have withdrawn to some place beyond my grasp, and I cannot fathom why.”
Because I heard you describe me as a practical arrangement, she thought.Because I heard you say you needed someone who would not expect, and I have been foolish enough to expect everything.
“There is nothing to reach,” she said quietly. “I stand before you.”
“No.” The word broke from him. “No, you do not. You are farther from me now than you have ever been, and I—”
He turned abruptly away, pressing his scarred hand against his eyes. She saw his shoulders tremble once—twice—before he mastered himself.
“Forgive me,” he said roughly. “I did not intend—I shall leave you to your work.”
He passed her and made for the door, and each measured step felt like a fresh wound.
Stop him, the voice inside her screamed.Stop him, tell him, let him explain—
But she did not move. She did not call his name. She remained where she stood, a ledger clutched against her breast, while the man she had begun, against all caution, to love walked away from her.
The door closed with a soft click that echoed like a knell.
***
That night, Eleanor dreamed of her mother.
They stood in the drawing room of her childhood home—the very chamber in which Arabella had spent so many silent hours gazing from the window at a world in which she no longer truly dwelt. Yet in the dream her mother turned, and truly looked at her, with eyes clear and present in a way they had not been for years before her death.
“You are doing as I did,” Arabella said softly. “You are disappearing.”
“I am protecting myself,” Eleanor replied. “It is not the same.”
“Is it not?” Her mother’s smile held a tender sorrow. “I told myself I was protecting my heart as well. From the pain of being unloved. From the slow grief of watching affection fade. I built walls so high that nothing could wound me—not sorrow, but not joy either.”
“He does not love me.”
“How can you be certain?”
Eleanor parted her lips to answer, yet no words came. How could she be certain? She had overheard fragments of a conversation. Had filtered those fragments through the lensof old wounds. Had assumed the worst, because assuming the worst had always kept her safe.
But what if she had been mistaken?
“You heard what you feared to hear,” her mother said gently. “You heard what your old hurt instructed you to hear. But fear is not truth, Eleanor. And shielding oneself from pain is not the same as living.”
“I cannot—”
“You can.” Arabella reached out, her hand warm against Eleanor’s cheek—warmer than Eleanor ever remembered it in life. “You are stronger than I was. Braver. You possess the courage to contend for what you desire, rather than simply fading from it.”
“What if I contend and lose?”
“Then you will have lost.” Her mother’s eyes were kind. “But you will have tried. And trying, my darling, is what distinguishes the living from the dead.”
