She wore her best dress to the ball where he laughed at her name. She left before sunrise. Gideon Harrow spent eight weeks discovering the woman he had mocked had already built a life that did not include him — and she hadn’t waited for his apology to start.

PART 2

My name is Marabel Harrow. I am Gideon’s sister, and I heard about the blank dance card from my maid before breakfast.

Every female guest at the Harrow spring ball had been issued one — pale cream, stamped with the Harrow crest. A record of every dance, every partner, every visible acknowledgment of a woman’s existence in that room.

Rosalie Witcom’s card came back entirely blank.

Not a single name in a single slot.

Gideon was already at the table when I came down. Unusual. He generally did not appear before nine. The coffee in front of him had gone cold. He was staring at the window.

I set the card on the table between us.

“She heard you,” I said.

Something moved across his face. Not quite guilt. The raw material of it, before a person has decided what to do with it.

“Don’t,” I said. Not unkindly. “Don’t tell me what you were and weren’t. I know what you said. The Harrington boy told me at breakfast. Word travels faster than you imagine it does, Gideon. Even when you think it stayed in a corner.”

He set his coffee cup down.

“She left before sunrise,” I continued. “Lenora received a letter this morning. She is not asking anyone to follow her. She did not say where she was going.”

The silence held.

“She was standing right there,” Gideon said finally. His voice was low. “Behind the palm.”

“Yes.”

“And I —”

“You looked away.” I said it for him. “I know. The Harrington boy told me that too.”

He stood up abruptly, crossed to the window, and stood there with his hands at his sides.

“I made one foolish joke,” he said at last. “I did not instruct her to disappear.”

I answered quietly. “No. You merely became the last person necessary to convince her she should.”

He did not respond to that. I had not expected him to. Some things require time to travel from the ears to the understanding. Longer for men like Gideon, who had spent thirty-five comfortable years in a world that had never seriously required him to feel the weight of what he said to people with less protection than himself.

I picked up the blank dance card. I held it for a moment. Then I set it back down and finished my coffee.

Outside, the morning was fully arrived. Pale light. Spring cold. The kind of day that does not know yet what it intends to become.

Somewhere on the northern road, a hired wagon was carrying Rosalie Witcom toward a town that had never heard her name.

And in the library on the southern end of the Harrow estate, the lamp had finally burned itself out.

The question nobody asked aloud that morning — but that every person in that house was thinking — was this:

Would he follow her?

And if he did, what exactly did he intend to find?