“She made the only choice available to her, given what you gave her—which was nothing, by the way.” James gave him a pointed look.
William said nothing.
“Have you ever thought that maybe Cecily wanted more than the agreement you both made? Has it ever occurred to you?”
Of course it had, but William didn’t know what giving that information would do, so he kept his mouth shut.
“Instead, you told me that you said she was a responsibility, William. You said those words to a woman who had spent years turning away suitors because she did not want to be someone’s obligation, and then you watched her walk out of the house.”
The light outside was fading. The street had gone quiet.
“I know what I said,” William grunted.
“Do you know why you said it?”
He thought about Cecily in this room. In the chair where she had sat for two nights, with an infant asleep on her shoulder, and looked at him with the expression that had undone everything.
That was the moment he had known. Not in the garden, not during the waltz, not in the library late at night. That moment in this room had been the moment he had understood that what he was feeling was not proximity or gratitude or the reasonable warmth of a man toward a woman who was kind to his sisters.
And he had taken that understanding and buried it under responsibility because the alternative was to admit it, and he did not know what he was supposed to do with something that large.
“I know why I said it,” William forced out.
James watched him. “Tell me.”
“Because I was–” William stopped. The word stuck in his mouth, and it tasted exactly like what it was. “Frightened. Because she had become–” He looked at the window. “Because I had allowed myself to want something outside the perimeter of everything I was supposed to want, and it was too large and too real. I could not—I could not see how to hold it safely, so I chose not to hold it at all.”
“That is not a justification,” James huffed. “I know what it is.”
“What is it?”
“A failure of courage.” He said it directly, without flinching. “A significant one.”
The room was very quiet.
“William, let me ask you something,” James said after a moment. “Do you regret your marriage?”
“No,” William said without thinking.
“Not the scandal, not the circumstances, not any of it?”
“No.” He said it again with the same conviction. “Not for a single moment.”
James looked at him. “Do you regret loving her?”
William said nothing.
He said nothing for long enough that the silence became the answer, and they both knew it.
James did not press the issue, because he understood when something had been said without words.
“She thinks it was pity,” William said finally. “Or obligation. She thinks I walked into that garden and kissed her because…” He heaved a sigh. “She thinks I called her a responsibility because that is what she was. To me.”
“Was she?”
“No.” The word came out with the same immediacy as the one before it. “She was–” He stopped and looked at the crib.
He thought about every morning at the breakfast table, the first time he saw Cecily—all of it. The full accumulated weight of a woman who had walked into his house and made it into something he had not known it was capable of being.
