William reached her at once, his expression disordered, his usual composure entirely absent. “Caroline, thank God—you must hear me. I have been trying to see you, but your father?—”
“Was quite right to refuse you. You are fortunate that is all he did. I am stunned he did not call you out,” she said evenly. “You have no business here. Not any longer.”
He faltered, clearly unprepared for the absence of softness in her response. “I know how it must appear, but you must understand, I had no choice in the matter. My grandfather—he has made it impossible for me to act as I ought. Had you been more patient, had you trusted me a little longer?—”
Caroline blinked.
Not in confusion, but in something very close to disbelief.
“You are blaming me,” she said, incredulous at his unmitigated gall.
He hesitated, then pressed on, as though he might recover the ground he had already lost. “Not blaming—only explaining. You were always pressing for an answer, always demanding certainty when I was not in a position to give it. You must see how that might drive a man to?—”
“To what?” she interrupted, her voice still calm, though something in it had sharpened. “To run away in the night with another woman? An actress? The mistress you’d been cavorting with in secret for six years while you kept me on a tether?”
“It was not like that,” he insisted quickly. “You make it sound far worse than it is. If you had only been more understanding—more willing to accept the realities of my situation?—”
Caroline stared at him.
And suddenly, she saw him.
Not as she had seen him before, softened by hope and shaped by expectation, but plainly. Clearly. Without excuse or embellishment. Every hesitation, every deflection, every careful evasion that had once seemed temporary now stood revealed for what it was—not circumstance, not misfortune, but choice.
He was small.
The realization settled into place with startling ease.
“You are a child,” she said.
The words came without effort, without heat, and perhaps for that reason they landed harder than anything she might have said in anger.
William stiffened. “I beg your pardon?—”
“You are not a man,” she continued, her tone steady, almost conversational. “Nor are you a gentleman. You are an overgrown boy who has spent years avoiding responsibility and calling it necessity. And now, when faced with the consequences of your own actions, you would place the blame anywhere but where it belongs.”
His face flushed, anger rising at last. “You cannot speak to me in such a manner?—”
“I can,” she said, cutting him off without raising her voice. “And I should have done so long ago.”
She regarded him for a moment longer, searching, perhaps, for some lingering trace of what she had once believed him to be. There was nothing there. Nothing she wished to hold on to. Nothing worth preserving.
“You have wasted enough of my time,” she said. “I am not inclined to permit you to squander yet more of it.”
Something in her tone—something final—seemed to reach him at last, though whether he understood it or merely recognized that he could not argue his way past it, she did not know. He stood there, his expression shifting through indignation and wounded pride, before settling into something sullen and resentful.
“You will regret this,” he said.
Caroline felt, quite unexpectedly, the faintest hint of a smile.
“I regret many moments with you, William, but not this one,” she replied. “I do not believe I ever will.”
She turned then and walked back toward the house without looking back, and with each step she felt it—the weight she had carried for so long lifting, not gradually, but all at once. There was no ache, no lingering sense of loss. Only sudden and blinding clarity. She would have grown unhappier with every passing day as his wife. And she would never have imagined that there was more out there for her than what his meager affections afforded.
Something broke within her, some wall of reserve that had been holding back everything for years. Her sadness and disappointment, but also her joy, her freedom. Her sense of adventure and hopefulness and optimism. It was as if she’d been caged for years and suddenly freed.
It was glorious. Until she climbed the steps and entered her home. There her mother paced furiously in the entry hall and her father stood, ever stoic, at the foot of the stairs, his attire impeccable even at such a late hour.
“We will return to the country as soon as possible,” he said.
