He left. The door closed. The study settled back into its silence, and Lucien sat in it until the walls began to close, and then he stood, pulled on his coat, and went out into the night.
The tavern lay south of Mayfair, where dukes went unremarked. Lucien sat in a corner with a tankard he did not remember ordering, watching the room without seeing it.
She approached after his second drink. Dark-haired, handsome, her gown cut to invite notice. She slid into the seat across from him and smiled with easy confidence.
“You look like a man in need of company.”
He studied her. She was beautiful, composed and deliberate. Once, he would have smiled back.
“Perhaps,” he said.
She rose and inclined her head toward the stairs. He followed.
The room above was small and clean. A bed, a candle, nothing more. She turned to him, her hand finding his chest.
The touch landed, and his body went cold.
Her fingers were warm and practiced. She knew how to draw a man in, how to make him forget. It did not matter. The moment her palm pressed to his chest, all he felt was the memory of another hand, smaller, trembling, clutching his waistcoat in a jasmine-scented alcove.
Lucien.
His name, breathless and trusting.
He stepped back. Her hand fell away, confusion flickering into offense.
“I …” he said. “I cannot.”
He left without another word. Down the stairs, through the tavern, into the night where the stars hid behind clouds.
He walked without direction, past darkened houses, along the quiet Thames, toward the distant glow of Mayfair where lives were performed and nothing was seen.
He walked until his legs ached and the sky paled. When he stopped, he stood before a building he knew, beneath the name painted above its door.
Lyra House.
The windows were dark. The children slept. By morning, the world he and Elinor had built would continue without them. That had always been the point. It was the right thing.
Lucien pressed his hand to the door and stood there as dawn broke.
Chapter Thirty
“When are you and the duke getting married?” Angelica asked from the front row, chin in her hands, eyes wide with the certainty that the world followed rules she had simply not yet learned.
Elinor’s chalk stilled against the slate. The lesson had been going well. She had slipped out of Morland House an hour earlier, pleading a headache Rebecca dismissed with a wave before leaving for Lady Pemberton’s card party. The others had gone with her. Joanna alone had squeezed Elinor’s hand in the corridor, quiet worry in her eyes.
The orphanage was unchanged. Fresh paint, solid floors, the name above the door still catching the light. Mrs. Neal had embraced her without surprise, and the children had swarmed her with the joy she had been starving for. They had new teachers to rely on now, yes … but heavens, she missed teaching them dearly.
And so, she’d snuck out. Because teaching would be the only thing that could make her forget. Forget about him.
She had taught them about Venus. The evening star, bright enough to be seen before full dark, mistaken for two bodies because it appeared at both dawn and dusk.
And now Angelica wanted to know about the wedding.
Elinor set the chalk aside and moved to the front of the room, lowering herself cross-legged to the floor, the way Lucien once had. The children drew closer.
“Sometimes,” she said, choosing her words the way she chose constellations for their lessons, with care and a prayer that the meaning would land, “people care about each other very much. They build things together, and they learn from each other, and they make each other’s lives brighter. But that does not always mean they can be together.”
Toby frowned. “Why not?”
