“Relief,” Clara said. She said it quickly though truthfully, there had been something mixed in with that relief. She just didn’t know what to name that yet.
Helena said nothing.
“I felt relief,” Clara repeated, more firmly, “because I have been through what it means to trust a man far more than he deserves to be trusted, and I have no intention of doing it again.” She looked at the fireplace. “Benjamin was not a cruel man. He was weak, and weak men are in some ways more dangerous than cruel ones because you do not see the damage coming until it is already done. I saw everything coming with Benjamin, and I trusted him anyway because I was in love with him and love made me make a cake of myself.” She spoke the word cleanly, the matter thoroughly settled and put away. “I am not making a cake of myself again.”
“Being hurt does not make you stupid,” Helena said. “It makes you hurt.”
“It makes you educated,” Clara argued, “on the subject of what you are and are not capable of surviving.” She turned back from the fireplace. “I know what Julian is. I am not blind to it. He is intelligent, and he is honorable, and he has been—yes, unexpectedly kind in ways I did not anticipate. He thinks ahead. He is steady. He kept me from falling apart in front of my parents this morning when I had quite forgotten about my grandfather James and how I had sworn to name my firstborn son after him, and I have not forgotten that.” She paused.
“But none of that changes what the arrangement is. Kindness is not love. Honor is not love. A man can be all of those things and still look at you one day and decide that something else suits him better, and you will not have seen it coming because you were too busy being grateful for the kindness.”
Helena was quiet for a moment.
“That is not what happened with Benjamin,” she said. “Benjamin did not look at you and decide something else suited him better. His family decided for him, and he was not strong enough to refuse them. That is a different thing.”
“The result,” Clara said, “was the same.”
Helena did not argue that point.
Outside the window, a carriage passed in the street below. Clara listened to it go and thought about Julian waiting for her at Lynden House, sitting at some desk or another, writing letters and making arrangements. She thought about the way he hadtaken her hand outside her parents’ house, not urgently or with any particular intent, just quietly, as though it had not required very much thought at all.
She pushed the thought away.
“I need you to be my friend in this,” she said to Helena, “and not my matchmaker. I need you to understand that I am telling you the truth when I say that I cannot afford to let this become something it is not. Not because Julian is not worth trusting but because I am not certain I can trust myself to trust someone again and come out the other side of it whole. And I need to come out of this whole. I have a baby to protect, a friend to find, and a marriage to eventually and quietly dissolve. I cannot do any of that if I am in the middle of falling in love with my own husband.”
Helena looked at her for a long moment.
“You said falling in love,” she said. “Not falling into the mistake of caring for him. Falling in love.”
Clara opened her mouth. Then she closed it.
“That,” she said, “is not what I meant.”
“I know it isn’t,” Helena said and picked up her tea again. “More tea?”
Clara looked at her. Helena looked back, her face the picture of serenity.
“You are insufferable,” Clara said.
“I have been told that I am rather formidable,” Helena agreed. She poured. “How is the baby?”
Clara accepted the redirect because it was the sensible thing to do and because the alternative was to sit with what she had just said until she understood what she had meant by it, and she was not ready to do that.
“He is well,” she said. “He is very well, actually. He barely cried in the night.” She paused. “Julian had someone stationed outside my door the whole night in case he woke.”
Helena said nothing, but the corner of her mouth moved.
“Do not,” Clara said.
“I am not doing anything,” Helena said.
“You are looking at me as though your mouth cannot wait to speak and say something you know I do not want to hear. Not everyone ends up falling madly in love with their husband through an arrangement just because you did and the Langleys did.”
“I am drinking my tea; that is all I am doing. And it is true. Many are rather miserable after making those matches.”
Clara looked at the ceiling briefly. Then she looked back at her friend, and despite everything, despite the whole impossible weight of the past twenty-four hours, she felt the tight coil of tension beneath her ribs finally begin to give way.
“I have missed you,” she said.
