CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
If Isadora had ever hoped their circumstances might be salvageable, that hope was dashed the morning she came down to find the breakfast room empty.
For all the silence between them, Nicholas had kept his promise to breakfast with her. Late sometimes, often lost behind his broadsheets—but healwayscame. She had learned to expect him there, by the waiting cup and folded napkin, the silver set opposite her own.
That morning there was one setting at the long mahogany table. The sideboard, too, had been reduced: eggs beneath a cover, a rack of toast, apricots luminous in the pale light. No coffee. Nothing kept warm for him.
Her stomach dropped into her feet. She stared at the empty chair, then at her single plate, and felt with deathly certainty that something had broken past mending.
“Where is His Grace?” she asked a footman who came in with fresh tea.
He dropped his gaze and set the pot down with inordinate care. “Today is the anniversary of the former duchess’s death, Your Grace.”
Grace.
The word was her own title, and still all she heard was the first wife’s name. No matter where she went, she could not escape Grace’s influence. Nicholas claimed he no longer loved her—yet what was this reticence, if not love? He was still in love with her after all this time, and nothing Isadora did would change it.
She was fighting a losing battle. Once, she had thought they had left Grace behind. Now, she no longer believed it.
“And Sophia?” she asked, keeping her voice very flat and calm.
“With His Grace, Your Grace.”
If they were together on the day of Grace’s passing, then they were probably at the cemetery.
Inside, Isadora seethed. Not that they were mourning her—they had a right to mourn—but that they had cut her off so they could do so. She was angry because Nicholas had claimed one thing and then his actions had proved another.
She was angry, because underneath all the anger was hurt, and she couldn’t allow the hurt a chance to win. Anger was better, more easily vanquished, more manageable as an emotion until it was.
Yes, it was far easier to be angry than anything else.
But there was her pride to consider.
“Thank you,” she muttered, taking a seat at the empty table. She helped herself to some pound cake and did her best not to let her iron mask slip. No one would know how deeply Nicholas had betrayed her or hurt her, or how embarrassed she was that she had to discover her husband’s absence from the servants and not from his own lips.
She would give him one final chance to make things up to her and prove that he could be a husband ofanykind, and then she would wash her hands of him and this marriage.
The cake tasted like ashes in her mouth, and she chewed mechanically. No one would know. She’d had enough of bleeding out in front of the world so everyone could see her hurt. No longer.
This time, she would take matters into her own hands.
Whatever she felt about Nicholas, she harbored no ill will toward Grace, and so she collected flowers from the rose garden before carrying them along the path she had once followed Nicholas down in the middle of the night. In sunshine, everything felt different. Cheerier, mocking her and her grief.
No doubt mocking Nicholas and his, too.
She came upon the small gravestone suddenly. The crumbling tomes that made her think of stumps of rotten teeth, and in the middle, by a new tombstone that looked far more recent than any of the others, was Nicholas, his arm around Sophia’s shoulders.
His head ducked as he said something, and then he smiled.
The smile was what undid Isadora the most. She had come assuming him to be in the depths of grief, but there was no sign of sorrow in the way he teased Sophia, flicking her on the ear and making her giggle. They looked like the sweetest father and daughter, unified in this moment.
They both turned to the grave at the same time, and Sophia said something, her lips moving solemnly even as her eyes held a smile.
Isadora looked at the roses in her hand. She’d intended to join them, offering her own condolences, but now the idea seemed petty and almost cruel. This was not her moment in which to intrude.
She turned to make her way back home.
“Izzie!” Sophia’s giddy shriek rang out, and Isadora froze before reluctantly turning back around to find Sophia running toward her, twin braids flying on either side of her face. “You came!”
