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The curtsy died halfway down. Rosalind brought herself up out of it with her breath gone thin.

“She looked straight through you,” Charlotte breathed. “After what you did for her! Does she even know that it was you, that night at Lady Marchwood’s?”

“She knows.” Rosalind’s voice came out level, though nothing in her was level. “That is what makes it a cut, and not an oversight.”

She had braced for this for two whole days. She had told Charlotte that she had stood worse and thought nothing of it. But the bracing had been for a thing imagined, and this was the thing itself. A door she had valued had been closed in her face, in a bright room, with the music still playing. Hurt went through her like cold water. Beneath it lay the worse thing, the new thing. The kindness had been real, before tonight, and now it was gone, and it would not come back.

Across the floor, she found Dover.

He stood twenty feet off, where he had been the whole hour, and he had gone very still. She knew that stillness, for she had spent a fortnight learning it. Going quiet was the most that guarded man ever did. But his stillness had only ever turned toward her in warmth, and now it wore a different cast. His shoulders had taken on some half-step of withdrawal. The whisper had reached him, then. The old scrutiny had come back up into his face. She had not seen that particular look since the very first weeks, when he had studied every room for the seam in it.

The look struck harder than Lady Pelham’s cut. For one moment Rosalind’s hands ached for a task — a salver, a candle, anything she might put right instead of standing here.

She did not move.

She stayed where she was in the green gown, her hands empty at her sides.

“They are wrong,” she said quietly.

“Rosalind?”

“They were wrong at Marbury, and they are wrong now. I will not carry it for them.”

“No,” Charlotte said, fierce and low. “You will not.”

Rosalind drew a breath that came clean at last, and turned toward Dover. His stillness was the one thing she could not bear, for she had read it as the trap closing upon him, and there was one thing left in the world that was hers to do. She meant to do it before he could be foolish enough to make it impossible. She crossed the small space to him, and the room watched her go, and she let it watch.

“Lord Dover.” She gave him the public form deliberately, because the public was the point. Then, lower, only for him: “James. Listen to me, for I shall only have the nerve for this once. You are free.”

“Free?” His voice was very low. “What do you mean by that?”

“Whatever you came here meaning to do tonight, you are not to do it.”

“You cannot know what I came meaning to do.”

“I can guess, and I will not allow it.” Her heart slammed against her ribs, but her voice held steady. “There is a thing being said of me in this room. It is true, and it will cost whoever stands near me.”

“Rosalind —”

“You have spent two years building a wall to keep exactly this kind of cost upon the far side of it, and you were right to build it. I will not have you pull it down for me. I will not be the bill you cannot afford.”

He opened his mouth, but she pressed on before her nerve could fail her.

“You owe me nothing. You gave me a true thing in a borrowed library when you owed me nothing at all, and I am giving you a true thing back. The true thing is this. Go. I never wanted your name. I want you to know that, whatever else they say of me tonight. I never once wanted the title, nor the standing, nor the rescue. I wanted the man who could not leave the room.” Her eyes burned, though she kept them open. “And that man is too good to be ruined for a woman who would rather lose him whole than keep him at a price she believes is false. So I am telling you plainly, before all of them. There is the door. You may take it with my whole heart, and I shall think no less of you, and I shall always...”

She stopped, for she had nearly said the very thing that would unsay every word of it.

“I have freed you,” she said instead. “That is all. Now you may do as you truly will.”

She stood there with her eyes open and her hands empty, having given him the way out clean. She had asked for nothing, and she owed nothing. The room was turning cold around her, and her own two feet were still beneath her.

* * *

The old fear came up in James, and came up hard. For one instant he was back in another bright room two years ago, hearing himself made a fool. His body had already turned half toward the door before he caught it.

Then Rosalind offered him that door herself.

She had asked him for nothing. She had just told him she wanted the man, not the name, and was willing to lose him rather than spend his standing.