Evander’s face went blank. The walls are rising. Mary watched them go up and refused, for the first time, to let them close.
“You put your hand on my face and kissed me as though I mattered, and you cannot do that.” Mary’s voice cracked. “You cannot hold me the way you just held me and pretend it is part of an arrangement. I will not let you use that word as though it costs you nothing, because it costs me everything.”
“Mary, I?—”
“I do not want a child because I am lonely.” She pressed her hands harder against her stomach. “I loved having Tommy. I loved every midnight feeding and every fussy afternoon and every morning when he grabbed my collar and looked at me as though I were the entire world. But I did not love it only because of the baby, Evander.” Her eyes burned. “I loved it becauseyouwere there. Because you watched from doorways and covered me with blankets and told fox stories in the dark and taught your brother how to hold a baby as though you had been doing it your whole life. I loved it because of you. Because you were in this house, and I was in this house, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere.”
Evander stood motionless. The fire crackled. The lamplight held them both.
“I cannot be alone again.” Mary’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I cannot have a baby and watch you retreat to your study and your ledgers and your distance while I raise another child in a house where my husband exists on the other side of a locked door. I did that with Tommy, and it nearly broke me, and I will not do it again. Not for a child. Not for a title. Not for anything.”
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. The tears had come without permission, and she did not try to hide them.
“If you want to give me a child, then give me a marriage. A real one. With all the risk and all the mess and all the terrifying, unpredictable, uncontrollable love that comes with it. And if you cannot do that, then do not touch my face as though I am precious to you, and do not make me believe for one single moment that you feel something you refuse to name.”
The room was silent. Evander’s hands hung at his sides. His face was pale in the lamplight, and his expression held nothing, and Mary stared at him and waited for the walls to hold or to fall, and the seconds stretched, and neither of them moved.
He opened his mouth.
He closed it.
Mary pressed her lips together. She pulled her robe tighter around herself and walked past him, toward the door. Her hand found the handle. She turned it.
“Goodnight, Your Grace.”
She closed the door behind her and walked down the corridor to her room. She did not run. She did not cry. She walked with her spine straight and her chin level and her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her fingertips, and she reached her room, and she closed the door, and she sat on the edge of her bed in the dark.
The tears did not come. Something worse came instead. Clarity. The bone-deep, unforgiving clarity of a woman who had just told a man exactly what she wanted and watched him stand there, silent, unable to give it.
She loved him. She loved him with the full, unreserved, terrifying weight of a heart that had spent twenty-one years waiting for something worth opening for.
But the man she loved could not love her back.
She lay down. She pulled the coverlet up to her chin. She stared at the ceiling, and the house was quiet, and somewhere on the other side of a wall, Evander stood in his room with the wreckage of his careful plans scattered around his feet.
Mary closed her eyes and let the silence take her, and she did not sleep for a very long time.
CHAPTER 29
“Are you certain about this?”
Mary stood beside Evander in the parlor, her hands clasped in front of her, her posture straight. She had dressed carefully this morning, her hair pinned, her collar buttoned to the throat.
“He is your father,” Evander said. “He deserves to hear it from us.”
“He deserves very little, in my estimation.”
“Perhaps. But this is not about what he deserves. It is about what Charlotte needs.” Evander adjusted his cuffs. “Your father will shout. He will bluster. He will say things that will make you want to slap him. I am asking you to let me speak first.”
Mary looked at him. The morning light caught the tension in her jaw and the steel in her eyes, and Evander saw the woman whohad barged into his parlor seven weeks ago and demanded to see a baby, and he understood that asking Mary Brightshaw to hold her tongue while her father attacked her sister was the most unreasonable request he had ever made.
“I will try,” she said. “But I am not making promises.”
Charlotte and William sat on the settee near the window. Charlotte’s hand rested in William’s lap, gripped tight, her knuckles white against his fingers. She held herself very still, her back straight, her chin level, but her eyes gave her away.
They moved to the parlor door every few seconds, then back to Mary, then to the door again, and the brittle composure she wore would not survive the first raised voice. She had been bracing for this morning for five months, and the bracing had worn her thin.
William sat beside her, his spine straight, his jaw set. He had dressed carefully, his best coat pressed, his boots polished, his cravat tied with the kind of precision that came from standing in front of a mirror and rehearsing the version of himself he wanted Charlotte’s father to see. His hand covered hers in his lap, steady and warm, and he did not fidget, and he did not look away from the door, and when footsteps finally sounded in the corridor, his grip on Charlotte’s fingers tightened, but his posture did not change.
