“I am asking about us,” she said. “About what happened in the garden, which was not—it was not an appearance. It was not for the benefit of anyone watching, because no one was watching. It was”—she held his gaze—“real. And I would like to understand what you intend to do with something real.”
The room was very quiet.
He looked at her for a long moment. She could see him making the decision, the precise moment it was made, the shift in his expression.
“I stepped closer,” he rasped. “That was a mistake.”
The word landed with the quiet brutality of things said simply.
She sucked in a sharp breath.
“You stepped closer,” she forced out. “You… you took my hand. You led me to the garden. You said–” She stopped herself.
She was not going to repeat what he had said in the garden, was not going to offer it back to him to be filed undermistakes.
“You have been stepping closer for weeks,” she said instead. “In the nursery, in this house. The way you look—you have been–”
“I know what I have been doing,” he cut in.
“Then why–”
“Because it cannot continue.” He said it with the quiet finality of a door closing. Not a slam, but worse than a slam. The soft, deliberate click of something locked. “Emotional entanglement clouds judgment. It produces exactly the kind of…” He searched for the right word. “… irrationality that a household like this cannot afford. My sisters depend on clear-headedness. The estate depends on it. I cannot–” He stopped.
She looked at him.
A household like this.
She had thought of it as a home, even though she had tried very hard not to.
She felt something harden inside her.
“What am I to you?” she asked.
He held her gaze but did not answer.
She asked it again, louder. “William, what am I to you?”
He was quiet for a moment that lasted entirely too long.
“I accepted responsibility for you when I married you,” he said. “That has not changed.”
Responsibility?
A part of her stopped living entirely.
The word went through her the way cold went through thin cloth, immediately reaching everything.
She thought of the garden and how he had touched her and spoken in the dark in a voice that had been for her and no one else. She thought of the nursery at three in the morning and his forehead against hers and the silence that had followed. Shethought of what he had just said, and she thought bitterly, with the hollow clarity of something finally understood,Of course.
“Responsibility,” she echoed.
“Cecily, we agreed–”
“Oh, I know what we agreed on.” She closed her eyes briefly. “I was there.” She kept her voice level, because the alternative was something she was not going to give him. Not in this room. Not today. “You agreed in a Brighton drawing room to marry a woman you did not know, and I agreed to accept it because I had no other choice. And then, somewhere between that drawing room and every evening since, something happened that was not in the agreement. And rather than–” She stopped. Breathed. “And you have just called it a mistake and called me a responsibility and said we should go our separate ways.”
He said nothing.
“Is that an accurate summary?” she prompted.
