The words should have felt like relief. They had always known the arrangement had an expiration. The Season was ending. This was always how it was supposed to conclude.
It did not feel like relief. It felt like standing on a cliff and choosing to step backward, away from the edge, away from the fall, knowing that the fall might have been the bravest thing she ever did.
“We’ll dissolve it,” Elinor said. “Declare it was a mutual agreement. Respectful. No scandal.”
“No scandal,” he echoed.
They looked at each other across the stone bench. The morning light fell between them, catching the dew on the grass, turning everything sharp and bright and temporary.
“Lucien.”
“Yes?”
She wanted to say it. The word sat on her tongue, three syllables that would change everything, that would shatter the careful agreement they had just made and replace it with something terrifying and true. She could see in his face that he was waiting for it, that some part of him was hoping she would say it so he would not have to be the one to go first, because going first had destroyed him eleven years ago.
She had sat in a fire-lit room and listened to him describe what it cost him, the shaking hands, the empty lodgings, the eleven years of believing that love was a door people walked through on their way out.
If she said it now, and he said it back, and then the ruse ended the way they had just agreed it would, she would be the next person who proved him right. Another woman who spoke the word and left.
She would not do that to him. Not unless she could promise what came after, and she could not. Not with Rebecca controlling herfuture. Not with the Season ending and no path forward that did not lead back to her stepmother’s house and whatever match Rebecca would arrange once the duke was gone.
Saying it without being free to keep it would be the cruelest thing she had ever done.
She did not say it.
“Travel safely,” she said instead.
Something closed behind his eyes. He nodded, took her hand, and pressed his mouth to her knuckles. His lips lingered. His thumb traced the bones of her hand, and Elinor held still because if she moved, she would pull him toward her and never let go.
He released her hand. He walked through the garden, around the side of the house, and she heard his horse a few minutes later, the hooves on gravel growing fainter until the lane swallowed the sound.
Elinor sat on the bench until Newton returned from his patrol and climbed into her lap. She held him and looked at the hills and wondered how a person could make the right decision and have it feel so much like a wound.
“You are stalling, my darling,” her father sat propped in his chair by the window, a blanket across his knees and the celestial atlas Lucien had given her open on the table beside him.
His color had returned over the past four days, and with it, his sharpness. He watched Elinor rearrange the books on his shelf for the third time that morning with patient amusement.
“I am organizing,” Elinor said.
“You are hiding. Go back to London, Elinor. Go back to your life, your engagement, and your duke.”
She set down the book in her hand and turned to face him. He looked so much better. The tremor in his hands had eased, and his appetite had returned, and that morning he had walked from his bed to the chair without help, Newton padding alongside him like a furry attendant.
“I do not want to leave you,” she said.
“I know.” He held out his hand, and she crossed the room and took it. “But I am not going anywhere. Not yet. The doctor says I am improving, and Thorne will fuss over me in your absence. You have a Season to finish and a man who is waiting for you.”
His eyes searched her face, and she knew he could see the sadness she was trying to fold away beneath composure. He had always seen through her.
“Whatever is troubling you,” he said, “you will find your way through it. You have your mother’s stubbornness and my curiosity, and between the two, there is nothing in this world you cannot navigate.”
Elinor’s throat tightened. She leaned down and pressed her forehead to his, the way she had done as a child, and he lifted his hand to the back of her head and held her there.
“I love you, Papa.”
“I love you, my stargazer. Now go. Before Newton and I grow too comfortable and refuse to share this chair.”
She laughed, and the laugh was half a sob, and she hugged him with a fierceness that made him grunt. He held her back with what strength he had, and for a long moment they stayed like that, father and daughter, in a room full of books and morning light.
