Annabelle kissed his forehead. She straightened, wiped her eyes, and walked to the door.
“I won’t tell you what to do,” she said from the threshold. “But I will tell you this: Elinor is not Vivian. She did not leave you, Lucien. But you left her. And if you do not fix that, you will spend the rest of your life sitting in this room with a bottle and a drawing, wondering what would have happened if you’d been brave enough to stay.”
She closed the door behind her.
Lucien sat in the empty study. The brandy decanter was nearly dry. Georgie’s drawing lay on the desk, the chalk lines smudged where his thumb had traced them.
He poured the last measure into his glass and did not drink it. He held it up to the dying light and looked through the amber at the room beyond, distorted and warm, and he thought about awoman who had once told him that magic was a feeling in your chest that burrowed and grew until you felt as though you might streak across the night sky like a shooting star.
He set the glass down untouched.
The fire went out. The room went dark. Lucien sat in it and let the darkness hold him, because the darkness was honest, and he had spent too long in rooms that glittered with light and contained nothing real.
Somewhere, Elinor was holding a celestial atlas against her chest.
Somewhere, children were sleeping beneath a roof withLyrapainted above the door.
Somewhere, the stars were out.
He closed his eyes. His hands had stopped shaking. The quiet of the room pressed against him, and inside it, for the first time since the door of Morland House had closed behind him, he let himself feel the full weight of what he had lost.
It was immense. It was everything.
And it was entirely his fault.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Tell me the truth, Elinor,” Annabelle walked beside her through Hyde Park.
Newton trotted ahead of them, his lead taut, his attention fixed on a cluster of pigeons that had not yet learned to fear him.
Elinor kept her gaze on the path. “I have told you the truth. The engagement ended by mutual agreement. There is nothing more to say.”
“There is a great deal more to say, and you know it.” Annabelle’s arm tightened through hers. “I was at that ball, Elinor. I watched you dance with my brother. I saw the way he held you after the music stopped. That was not a man ending something. That was a man holding on to something he was terrified of losing.”
The words pressed against the bruise that had not stopped aching since the parlor, since the knuckle kiss, since the door closing. Elinor adjusted Newton’s lead and said nothing.
“Please.” Annabelle’s voice softened. “I am not asking as his sister. I am asking as your friend. Because you are my friend, Elinor, regardless of what has happened between you and Lucien, and I can see that you are not fine.”
“I am fine.”
“You are wearing the same dress you wore three days ago.”
Elinor looked down. She was. The gray one. The one she had put on the morning of the dissolution and apparently had not stopped reaching for since.
“It is comfortable,” she said.
Annabelle gave her a look that made clear she did not believe a word of it but loved Elinor enough not to press. They walked on in silence. The park was crowded with the last promenaders of the Season, ladies in bright silks and gentlemen in polished boots, all performing the rituals of a world that continued whether or not Elinor wished it.
Newton caught a scent and lunged. Elinor steadied the lead, crouched to free him from a rosebush, and straightened to find a lord before her.
“Lady Elinor.” He bowed, smiling with practiced interest. “Lord Whitley. I could not help but notice you. I understand you were recently engaged to the Duke of Fairmont.”
“I was,” she said.
“A distinction indeed. A woman who catches a duke’s eye must have remarkable qualities.” His gaze traveled over her, appraising. “I should be honored to call, if you would permit it.”
He was handsome, well-dressed, and perfectly mannered. Elinor felt nothing. He was not Lucien, and that was enough.
