Then she disappeared.
I blink back to the room. “Do you really not remember what happened?” This is the last time I’ll ask her.
Her breathing stutters. “I swear it. It’s awful, knowing that anything could have happened to me. Makes me feel like my body isn’t my own anymore or something. I can’t explain it.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“I don’t think I would have chosen to do this to you, but I’m sorry if I did. I’m sorry it happened at all. I should have protected you.”
It’s the first apology I’ve gotten, but now that it’s out in the air, I don’t think I ever needed it. I’ve always known this is how Lydia felt. We’re too tied together that way.
“It’s all right,” I say, and I’m surprised to find I mean it. “We’ll be old spinsters together.”
Lydia laughs, but there’s no real force behind it.
When Papa dies, his title will pass to a second cousin we’ve nevermet and the creditors will take the rest. I hope selling the May Queen tiara will help once I’ve lost the competition for Prince Bram.
“Mama told me you didn’t make a bargain. That wasn’t very smart,” Lydia says.
I shrug. “Because it went so well for you?”
She frowns. “Mean.”
I don’t tell her what I asked the queen. Lydia would only feel guilt, and I see no need to punish her with it. “He’s not going to pick me. I didn’t see the point.”
Lydia may have been meant for Lord Chapwick, but my poor prospects were an equally foregone, but much less appealing, conclusion. The awkward second daughter of an impoverished marquess—even at the best of times I could never have hoped for better than a widower decades my senior or one of the lesser members of the aristocracy with something so broken inside of him, he’d been rejected by everyone else: one of the cruel men, the liars, the cheats.
It’s a relief to have saved myself from that fate, even if I’ve doomed us in a different kind of way.
“Can I tell you a secret?” I ask my sister.
“Always.”
“I went out to look for you when you were gone. Snuck out in the middle of the night and everything.”
She bolts upright, aghast. “Ivy! What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that I’d be able to feel it if you were dead. You ought to give me credit; I was right.”
I was hoping she’d laugh, but she just looks sad again. “What happened?”
“You’re never going to believe me.”
She holds out her pinkie. We only pinkie promise when Mama is not around, as she hates being left out. “I promise I will,” she says.
“I got lost, and Prince Emmett ran me over in his stupid carriage.”
“He did not!”
I nod. “He took mercy on me and escorted me home after that, but still.”
Lydia frowns. “He was probably up to all sorts of lecherous things, out in the middle of the night like that.”
“I pity any girl foolish enough to fall for his tricks.”
“How are you going to stand him when Bram marries you?”
I roll my eyes. “I’ll have you move in as my lady-in-waiting and we can torment him together. He’ll never know a day of peace.”
