The room was very quiet.
“While he was there?” Letitia asked, raising her eyebrows.
“While he was there.”
William made a sound. It was a short, contained sound that communicated a great deal about what he was currently thinking about his closest friend, none of which he had apparently decided was appropriate to say aloud.
“What did James say?” Cecily pressed.
“He said she came uninvited.” Isadora looked at the fire. “He said he sent her away. He said there was nothing between them.”
“Then perhaps?—”
“He has spent years being exactly who society has always said he was,” Isadora cut in. “Charming and careless and… It is not a secret. It was never a secret. I knew it before I came to Ashbourne, and I decided—” She pressed her lips together. “I decided that it had changed. That he had changed. That I was—” She broke off.
“Izzy,” Letitia said softly.
“I am in love with him,” Isadora admitted.
She said it the same way she had said it on the terrace to Violet—plainly, because saying it any other way would not make it more or less true. But this time, there were people in the room to hear it, and it landed differently.
Her eyes filled again, which she had specifically decided was not going to happen anymore.
“I am in love with my husband.” Her voice broke. “And I am sitting here crying about it, which is… exactly the thing I spent years trying to prevent. I have managed it spectacularly.”
“Oh, Izzy.” Letitia put her arm around her.
Isadora let her, because the alternative was sitting up straight and being composed, and she had used everything she had on the carriage.
“There is a misunderstanding,” Letitia said into her hair. “There has to be. James is not… I watched him at Ashbourne. I watched what he said and did. He cannot have another woman somewhere, Izzy. He cannot. He looked at you the way?—”
“How he looks at me does not mean what I thought it meant,” Isadora argued.
“I think it means exactly what you thought it meant.”
“Letitia.” She pulled back slightly. Her nose was running. She accepted the handkerchief Cecily produced and pressed it to her face. “He stood in the entrance hall this morning, and I told him I was leaving, and he did not say anything. I gave him every opportunity to.” The entrance hall came back to her with vividness. “He opened his mouth and said nothing. He just… stood there and let me leave.”
Silence fell over them.
“That is the most—” William began.
“William,” Cecily warned.
“I am not going to say anything unkind about him in front of?—”
“William.”
He exhaled and looked at Isadora with the expression he had been wearing since she had arrived. His jaw tightened, and he paced, visibly livid.
“I told him,” he said very quietly. “I told him that if he felt something and said nothing, I would not forgive it.”
“You knew?” Isadora stared at him.
“I knew something had changed,” he admitted. “I didn’t know whether he would… I thought he would—” He pressed two fingers to his jaw. “I thought he was better than this.”
“He probably is,” she said wearily. “It is more likely that I have simply…” She looked at her hands. “That I misread it. That I saw what I wished to see because I was already…” She gestured vaguely to herself.
“You did not misread anything,” Letitia stated, with flat certainty. “I was there. For three days. I watched him at dinner and at the card table and in the nursery, and I am telling you, Isadora Margaret Harcliffe, that man did not look at you the way he looked at you because he had someone else in London.”
