“That is an ungrateful interpretation of years of care.”
Diana gave a short, unsteady laugh, but there was no real humor in it, only hurt worn thin.
“Care?” she repeated softly. “Is that what you call it? You decided what I should wear, what I should say, what I should want, and all the while I was expected to be grateful for it. If that was care, Aunt, it did not feel like kindness.”
Lady Cliffhall drew herself up, aghast, the very picture of outraged propriety. “You are overwrought.”
“Perhaps.” Diana’s throat tightened, but she did not look away. “Perhaps I have been overwrought since I was nine years old and no one in your house had the decency to notice that I was a grieving child.”
That landed, and for the first time, the older woman’s expression faltered.
Diana pressed on, because if she stopped now, she would never say it.
“Do you know what I wanted?” she asked, more quietly now, and the softness of the question was sharper than all that had preceded it. “I wanted to be loved in peace. I wanted someone to care whether I was afraid. Whether I was hurt. Whether I was lonely. I wanted, absurdly enough, the very ordinary happiness you made me feel ashamed for desiring.”
Lady Cliffhall swallowed. “You are a duchess.”
“Yes,” Diana said. “And for a year, I was a duchess abandoned on my wedding day. Tell me, did the title keep me warm?”
Her aunt’s fingers tightened around her reticule until the knuckles showed white through the kid gloves. “If your husband has disappointed you, that is scarcely my crime.”
“No,” Diana replied with terrible calm. “Your crime was teaching me, long before he ever had the chance, that what I wanted did not matter if enough prestige could be obtained in exchange for my silence.”
For several seconds, Lady Cliffhall said nothing at all. Then, with visible effort, she gathered herself again, drawing dignity around her like a cloak she believed was still capable of defending her.
“I see,” she said stiffly. “You have become theatrical in your marriage.”
Diana’s lips parted in disbelief.
And then, suddenly, she was calm. She had, at last, found the center of the wound.
“If you say one more careless thing to me in this house,” she said, each word clear and quiet and utterly without tremor, “I shall ring for the footman and have you shown out.”
Her aunt stared, and Diana held her eyes.
At length, Lady Cliffhall rose. “You are not yourself.”
“No,” Diana said. “I believe, for the first time in many years, I am very nearly myself indeed.”
A flush of outrage darkened the older woman’s face, but perhaps there was enough truth in the room by then to make even her cautious. She drew herself up, muttered something about tempers and ingratitude, and swept toward the door.
At the threshold, she paused. “You will regret speaking to me so.”
Diana looked at her steadily. “I have regretted my silence far more.”
Then her aunt was gone. The door closed, and the room fell quiet again.
Diana remained where she was for a long moment, her whole body trembling with the aftermath of release.
Nothing in her felt victorious. She still ached, but beneath all that misery lay a strange, exhausted steadiness. She had said it, at last. She had looked one of the designers of her life’s unhappiness in the face and refused to play the grateful, well-married niece any longer.
Outside the window, the late afternoon light had begun to soften over the gardens.
Diana crossed slowly to the chair beside the fire and sank into it, her limbs heavy, her eyes stinging anew, though no fresh tears fell. Her hands rested loosely in her lap. The house murmured around her in distant, ordinary sounds. Somewhere far above, a door opened and closed.
Her heart gave its foolish little leap again.
She shut her eyes and leaned back, one hand pressing lightly over the place beneath her ribs where hurt and want, and anger had all tangled themselves together so tightly she no longer knew what to do with them.
