She lifted the fork again and forced herself to take a bite, to chew, to swallow. It tasted like nothing. Her appetite vanished entirely.
She set the utensil down with finality and rose.
“That will be all,” she said quietly.
“Your Grace?—”
“I have no further need of dinner.” Her tone did not rise, and yet it allowed no argument.
She did not wait for a response.
She was already moving, her skirts whispering against the floor as she left the dining room, the sound trailing behind her like the echo of something restrained too long. Her steps quickened despite herself, the careful composure she had maintained throughout the day beginning to fracture at the edges, each breath coming a little too fast, a little too shallow.
This is absurd. I am behaving like?—
She cut herself off as her jaw tightened. She was behaving like a wife who expected her husband to appear. That was all.
She turned sharply down the corridor that led toward his study, the decision forming even as her pulse began to pound with a force that felt entirely disproportionate to the situation, and yet utterly impossible to ignore.
She reached the door. Paused only for the briefest fraction of a second, her hand hovering above the handle as her pulse thundered in her ears, loud enough to drown out reason, loud enough to demand action. Then?—
She pushed it open.
Alexander looked up from where he stood beside the decanter, one hand braced against the edge of the desk, the other curved around a glass of whiskey. He looked like a man interrupted in the middle of an argument with himself.
“Is this what you do now?” Diana said, the words cutting into the room before the door had even finished swinging shut behind her. “Hide from me in your study?”
For one suspended moment, he did not answer. That silence told her more than any expression could have done.
The fire burned low in the grate, its glow carving hard lines over his face, sharpening the severe beauty of him until he looked less like the husband who had smiled at her across breakfast tables and more like the stranger who had once left her standing in pearls and white silk, humiliated before their marriage had even begun.
His sandy hair was faintly disordered as though he had run a hand through it too many times, and his merciless, beautiful eyes that had spent weeks looking at her with warmth and admiration were colder now, shuttered.
Something inside her lurched.
He set the glass down with care that was almost offensive in its calm. “I had business to attend to.”
The words were simple, flat. She knew that tone, that clipped, glacial dismissal. Diana stood very still, her fingers tightening at her sides beneath the silk of her gown.
“Business,” she repeated, and hated the way the word trembled at the edges.
His jaw shifted. “I do not require your permission to attend to my affairs.”
No. Of course not.
For several terrible seconds, she heard nothing but the rush of her own blood, hot and loud in her ears.
She knew before she even asked, and still she heard herself say it. “Your memories have returned.”
A strange stillness entered him then. He turned away from her for one heartbeat, reaching again for the glass he had set down, though he did not drink. The movement was enough.
Diana felt something inside her begin to break with slow, exquisite precision.
“So it is true.” A laugh escaped her then, though there was no humor in it, only disbelief sharpened into pain.
He finally looked at her fully. “You are being dramatic.”
The words struck like a slap.
