The baby stirred, resettled, and sighed.
She watched him.
I wanted a family.
Not in the abstract. Not the general, theoretical family of a woman who had been told since girlhood that this was what she was supposed to want.
She had wanted this family. These specific people, in this specific house, with the warmth she had felt in it from the first afternoon, with the sisters and the cat story and the knocked-over cream.
She had wanted Isadora finding her books, Letitia arguing about everything, an orphan baby in a nursery, and a man who stayed up through the night because he could not stand to be anywhere near something vulnerable and not account for every possible thing that could go wrong.
She had wanted him.
She still did, which was the part she was going to have to manage.
The candle on the table burned low. The baby breathed evenly. Outside, the London night continued its indifferent business.
She stayed in the chair until the candle went out, and then she sat in the dark. She exhaled heavily, missing the house she had left, the people in it, the life she had almost built inside, and would now have to take apart.
She did not try to make it smaller than it was. It was not small.
It wasthe largest and most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me.
It was even larger than the scandal. Even larger than the wedding and the loneliness she felt when she had first arrived at Blackmoor House.
All of that had happened to her.
This she had walked into herself, with her eyes open, and that made it entirely different.
She sat with that for a long time and let herself grieve the life she had very nearly, very foolishly, begun to hope for.
Then she stood, smoothed her wrapper, and went back to the blue room. She lay down and watched the ceiling slowly become lighter as the morning dawned.
CHAPTER 27
“Good morning,” William said at breakfast.
Letitia looked at her plate.
“Good morning,” Isadora said in a small voice.
William sat. A footman poured his coffee. The silver was laid correctly, the bread was sliced, and the butter dish was in its place. Everything was exactly as it should have been.
But the room felt entirely wrong and quiet.
He unfolded the first letter beside his plate and read it without registering a word of it. He reached for his coffee.
He was aware, with the specific awareness of a man in a room filled with tension, of the absence at the opposite end of the table. Not the chair itself—the chair was there—but theatmosphere that had occupied it for two months, the warmth of it, the way breakfast had become something he looked forward to.
Letitia had not touched her toast.
Isadora was eating with careful, deliberate attention, giving her hands something to do.
“The weather has improved,” William said.
Neither of them responded.
“I believe there are two girls sitting at breakfast with me.” He chuckled lightly and looked at them.
