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"If you dedicate the rest of your life to paying penance for a fight you could not win, then what?"

Laurence took another step.

"What becomes of your wife?"

Arthur frowned but offered no reply.

The disappointment in Laurence’s expression was somehow harder to bear than anger ever could have been.

"You punish yourself for what happened to Sophia. Very well. But what of your wife? You destroy a woman who loves you simply because you have decided you are undeserving of her."

Arthur’s jaw tightened.

"And then what, Buck?"

Silence.

Laurence regarded him for a long moment.

"So tell me..." he said quietly. "What exactly do you intend to do with a wife you refuse to allow yourself to love?"

He had not answered. There had been nothing he could say.

Laurence had left him standing alone in the ruins of his office, surrounded by shattered crystal and splintered mahogany, the question lingering long after his oldest friend had gone.

Arthur had no answer then and he had no answer now. His thoughts drifted, as they had done a hundred times over the past fortnight, to Laurence's farewell dinner.

Two weeks had passed since his confrontation with Eliza, yet Arthur could still recall with painful clarity the days that followed, culminating in that disastrous final dinner with Laurence.

For three consecutive evenings, Eliza had failed to appear. Each night, Arthur had found himself glancing towards her empty chair as though sheer force of will might summon her into it.

It never did.

Then, on Laurence's final evening at Winworth, she came.

He should have known she would never miss Laurence's farewell.

She had crossed the dining room in a simple ivory gown that did nothing to disguise how pale she had become. At the time, Arthur had told himself it was the colour that washed out her complexion, preferring to blame an unfortunate choice of dress rather than acknowledge what was plainly before him.

She was suffering.

Even now, he wondered what occupied those endless hours within her chambers, and whether she devoted them to anything other than mourning a marriage he himself had broken.

Sophia had chosen that evening to make an appearance too, inviting herself to dinner in a navy silk gown designed to draw every eye in the room towards her. She had always understood the value of an entrance. Sophia peacocked instinctively, commanding attention before she ever spoke. Arthur had instructed Ellis to find her quarters in the west wing precisely because he wanted her as far away from him as possible.

Eliza chose the chair beside her.

Sun and moon.

The comparison had come to him almost immediately. Sophia, golden and deliberately radiant, beside Eliza in her quiet ivory, pale enough that he had spent the better part of the meal trying desperately not to notice.

Arthur had told himself not to look at his wife.

Not to study the shadows beneath her eyes.

Not to notice how little she ate.

Then his mother corrected Sophia's manners, and everything changed.