“Then why does he treat me as though I am?”
“Perhaps because he does not know how to treat you as anything else.” Mrs. Bridwell paused. “I have been in service to many families. I have seen marriages that began with less than yours and grew into something real. I have also seen marriages that began with promise and rotted from neglect.” She held Mary’s gaze. “The difference was never the beginning. It was whether someone kept trying.”
Mary said nothing. She rocked Tommy and listened to the clock on the mantelpiece count the seconds of another afternoon in a house where her husband moved through rooms she was not in and left through doors she was not meant to follow through.
“Goodnight, Harding.”
Mary stood at the top of the staircase. Below, Evander crossed the entrance hall in his greatcoat, his collar turned up, his stride the purposeful clip of a man going somewhere he intended to be.
Harding held the door. The night air swept in. He stepped through without looking up, and the door closed, and the house settled into the silence he left behind.
The fourth night in a row.
Mary gripped the banister. She had taken to positioning herself here at half past ten, not because she intended to confront him, but because she needed to see it. Needed the evidence. The first night could have been business. The second, a gentleman’s club. The third, she had told herself, he was searching for Richard, because the alternative was a thought she did not want to finish.
By the fourth night, the thought finished itself.
He left at eleven and returned after two. She knew because she lay awake and listened for his footsteps, and when they finally passed her door, steady and unhurried, she pressed her face into the pillow and counted the beats of her own heart until it slowed.
She descended the stairs. Harding had retreated to wherever butlers retreated when the house was locked.
“Harding.”
He reappeared with the swiftness of a man who never truly left.
“Where does His Grace go at night?”
“I could not say, Your Grace.”
The same answer as last time. The same careful blankness. Mary studied his face and saw nothing, because there was nothing to see. Harding was a locked door, and she did not have the key.
“Thank you.”
She climbed the stairs again. The corridor stretched before her, dim and quiet. She walked past the nursery door without stopping. Tommy was asleep. Mrs. Bridwell would tend to him if he woke. Mary did not need to stand over his crib again, whispering reassurances to a baby who could not understand them and drawing comfort from a child because no one else in this house would offer it.
She was tired of being the only one who showed up.
In her room, she sat at the dressing table and unpinned her hair. The mirror showed a woman she was beginning not to recognize.Thinner in the face. Sharper around the eyes. Ten days of caring for a baby, managing a household, and being avoided by her own husband had carved something new into her features. Not grief. Something harder.
She set the pins down and looked at her reflection.
Mary had spent her life being what other people needed. The dutiful daughter. The accommodating bride. A wife who sat in the dark while her husband disappeared at night. The woman who held someone else’s baby and called it enough.
She was finished being enough.
Tomorrow, she would stop waiting for the Duke of Blackholm to become the husband she needed. She would stop listening for his footsteps outside her door. She would stop hoping that the man who covered her with a blanket in the dark might one day find the courage to do it in the light.
She would make a life in this house whether or not he participated in it.
Mary blew out the candle and climbed into bed. She did not listen for footsteps. She did not count heartbeats. She closed her eyes, and for the first time since her wedding, she fell asleep before the Duke came home.
CHAPTER 9
“You look terrible.” Quentin dropped into the leather chair opposite Evander and signaled to the footman for two brandies.
The club was quiet for a Thursday evening. A handful of members occupied the card tables at the far end, and a pair of elderly viscounts argued about horse racing near the fire, but the smoking room where Evander had positioned himself was empty save for the two of them.
Three weeks had passed since the basket, the bride, and the scandal that welded them together. Twenty-one days of solicitors, Bow Street reports that led nowhere, and a house that shrank a little more every evening.
