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“I remember it.” Her voice came out smaller than she intended.

“I have carried the unfinished half of it about ever since.” He paused, choosing his words as carefully as he had chosen them across a side-table and a length of ivy. “It has grown heavy, and I would rather set it down.”

Her hands wanted the box again, though she refused to let them have it. Instead she folded them one over the other, as she always did when she was afraid, and kept her chin at the height Augusta had taught her.

“You need not,” she said. “I am sure it was nothing that needs finishing.”

“It was not nothing.” He spoke gently, and the gentleness frightened her far more than sternness could have done. “I have watched you mend three evenings now, for people who will never know you did it.”

“Mend?” she repeated, though her heart had begun to beat very fast. “I hardly know what you mean.”

“I think you do.” He held her gaze. “I have watched a certain countess, on more than one evening, stand among her friends and call you, in your hearing, so very capable about the house. As one might speak of an upper servant.”

Heat rushed to her cheeks, then drained away as quickly. He saw all of it. How long has he been watching me?

“And I watched you take it as you take everything,” he went on, his jaw tightening. “You decided it was fair, and then you found a thing to do with your hands.”

“She is my stepmother,” Rosalind said, while a cold weight settled in her chest. “She did not mean...”

“She meant to diminish you, and you know it.” His voice stayed quiet.

“Please do not.” The words came out in a whisper, though part of her longed for him to go on.

“Very well. I will not tell you what it means.” He held her gaze. “I will tell you what I saw. You did not answer her. You found something to do with your hands instead.”

Rosalind’s fingers tightened together.

“At the Glanvilles’,” he continued, “you told me why.”

Her breath caught. “Because a thing with my name on it can be refused.”

“Yes.” His expression changed by the smallest degree. “I have thought of that ever since.”

Her aunt loved her and was bound to take her side. Lord Dover had no such obligation. He had remembered one frightened sentence spoken in the middle of a dance and carried it with him for a week.

Against that she had no defense at all.

She found she had nothing to say. Every answer she possessed had been made for the sort of man who flattered in order to gain, and this was something else entirely. Silence rose up in the warm green room while she stood inside it, keeping her hands from the box.

“You ought not to say such things to me,” she said at last, her voice unsteady however she tried to level it. “I have no answer that fits. You give me a true thing, and I have only false ones to hand back. I am sorry for it.”

“Do not be sorry.” Something eased in his face. “Give me a true one, then. Any true one. It need not be the size of mine.”

So that was the thing he had done at the Glanvilles’, laid bare at last. He had given her the true thing first, the heavy half he had carried a sennight, and now he waited with empty hands to see whether she could find one of her own to set beside it. He had cleared the ground for her, at his own cost, so that she might have somewhere to stand.

She looked at him in the orange light, her hands folded and her heart pounding hard. One line she had spent her whole grown life teaching herself never to cross now lay directly before her, and once she stepped over it, there would be no stepping back. Can I do it? Dare I? What becomes of me if I do?

“James,” she said.

Saying it cost her so much that for a moment she could follow it with nothing at all. She had never once spoken his name aloud, yet now she had said it to his face, in the green light, while her aunt sat at the far end of the gallery. Her heart went like a hammer as dread came up cold beneath the sweetness. Now he knows. A thing known can be taken back, and I have given him the taking of it.

Lord Dover went very still.

For a long moment he made no answer, and the silence frightened her past anything that had come before it. She had handed him the one weapon she had kept from every other man, her own heart spoken in his name, and he simply held it. Was this where his regard withdrew? Was this where it all came to nothing?

Then he said her name back.

“Rosalind.” He said it low and plain, with the same care, as though the name were something he had been keeping also and was glad to set down. “There. You see? It does not break anything.”