“What is?”
“Lately, it feels as though something is… changing. Between us.” She shook her head, as if she could dislodge the thought by physical effort alone. “I know it should not. I know what this is. What it was always meant to be.”
Letitia and Cecily exchanged a glance that Isadora did not entirely catch, and was glad she did not.
“Do you want it to change?” Letitia asked.
The question landed with more weight than its size should have allowed. Isadora felt it settle somewhere beneath her ribs.
“No,” she said too quickly.
She heard herself speaking before she’d had a chance to actually consider the question. She pressed on regardless, as though saying it faster might make it truer.
“No. It’s safer this way. Whatever this is between us, it has to stay exactly as it began. Practical. Controlled. That was the agreement, and the agreement is what makes it bearable.”
“Bearable,” Cecily said quietly. It was not quite a question.
“Workable,” Isadora corrected, though she was no longer certain there was a meaningful difference between the two words, or why she had reached for the second one as though it were safer than the first.
Cecily turned her teacup slowly in its saucer, her lips pursed. “Feelings rarely remain controlled forever, Izzy,” she murmured.
“They can.”
“Can they?”
Isadora didn’t answer that.
“In my experience, they tend to do exactly as they like, regardless of what arrangement we’ve made with ourselves about them.”
Isadora did not answer that either. Instead, she looked at Violet, unaware that the woman watching over her was doing the samething she had watched her own mother do for years—building something that looked like love from the outside and calling it anything else so that it could never be used against her.
She had seen what happened when a heart went unguarded in that house. She had spent years learning the precise architecture of how to keep her own from making the same mistake.
Trusting it now, after everything, still felt like the more dangerous thing by far.
The fire crackled in the grate. Letitia, sensing that this was not a thread to pull further just yet, reached over and refilled her cup without being asked.
CHAPTER 19
“Ihave decided,” Letitia announced after a while of arguing, “that I will only marry for love.”
“You’ve decided that before,” William reminded her.
“I reaffirm it periodically. It bears repeating.”
“You reaffirmed it in June. And again, after the Langley ball.”
“The Langley ball gave me a great deal to think about.”
“Lord Langley ’ssongave you a great deal to think about,” William corrected. “I think that is rather it.”
“He danced with me twice and then spent twenty minutes discussing his horses,” Letitia said. “I thought about him very briefly and concluded he was entirely wrong for me, which I consider a success of discernment rather than a failure ofanything else.” She reached for the bread. “The broader position stands. I will marry for love, or I will not marry at all.”
“Good, I support this entirely,” William declared.
Letitia turned to look at him, blinking. “You do?” she asked. “That’s it? Good?”
“Of course, what else would I say?” He reached for his wine. “Why would I argue with you about that?”
