“James…” Another tear slid down her cheek. She brushed it away with the back of her hand almost impatiently, as though annoyed by her own weakness.
He looked into her eyes. They were glistening with unshed tears.
Another tear escaped despite her efforts to stop it. Then another. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, blinking furiously.
His heart lurched painfully.
God, he wanted to hold her. To pull her against his chest until she ceased trembling, to run a hand through her hair, to whisper that she did not need to doubt him ever again, to cradle her face in his hands and wipe away every tear before it had the chance to fall
Yet he remained where he was, rooted to the spot by the terrible knowledge that she was crying because of him.
She turned her face away from him, not because she was angry, but because she did not want him to see her cry.
Something inside him unraveled.
Her nose, he noticed, was slightly red at the tip. She had been crying before he arrived. Alone in this house. And all of it, every bit of it, was because of him.
She was in pain because of him.
He felt it like something physical. Not guilt, exactly. It was older and more specific, the recognition of a man who had done the thing he was most afraid of doing, which was hurting the person he was least willing to hurt.
“It’s the nondeliberate hurting I’d watch out for. The slow one. The one where you do not decide anything at all…”
William’s voice echoed in his mind with cruel clarity.
Standing here now, watching Isadora struggle to contain tears he had caused, he could no longer dismiss it.
He had spent years building a reputation for faithlessness. Now, the woman he loved could not distinguish the truth from the lies others expected of him.
And why should she? He had given the world every reason to believe the worst of him.
“I am sorry,” he said quietly.
She laughed through her tears. “So am I.”
“No.”
She closed her eyes. “I cannot do this anymore, James.”
He stood perfectly still.
If he loved her, if he truly loved her, how could he ask her to spend the rest of her life doubting him? How could he ask her to carry the burden of a reputation he had earned long before she entered his life?
Perhaps William had been right. What if this was simply what he did? What if the man who had moved through his adult life without accumulating anything he couldn’t leave behind was not someone who had changed but had found a more expensive version of the same pattern?
Perhaps loving him would always require more pain than joy.
Perhaps Isadora deserved a man whose loyalty was never questioned. A man who had not spent years becoming the villain of every gossip column.
The confession died on his lips.
Isadora deserved the kind of love she had always believed in. Standing there, he did not know whether he was capable of offering it without eventually proving her worst fears correct.
The silence stretched.
Isadora looked at him for a long moment. Hope lingered in her eyes for just a heartbeat longer. Then it faded.
“I understand,” she said softly.
