Three years she carried his life on her back and he never once thought to ask what it cost her. Then she stopped answering his secret signal across a crowded ballroom — and something in him finally cracked open.

PART 6

Instead, a profound stillness filled her chest. It wasn’t a sudden surge of longing for Alagan that stopped her. It was a sudden, devastating surge of respect for Henry.

She looked at this decent, intelligent man and understood, with total clarity, the cruelty of what she was about to do. If she married him, she would hand him a shell — her schedule, her polite conversation, her competent management of his household — but never the frantic, consuming voltage she had once poured into Alagan Ford for three years. She would be doing to Henry exactly what Alagan had done to her: accepting devotion without returning it in full measure.

“Henry,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

He turned. His mild, perceptive eyes moved across her face, and the hopeful smile on his lips dissolved slowly into a quiet, bracing stoicism. He was a smart man. He didn’t need her to finish the sentence to know how it ended.

“I see,” he said softly, looking back out at the lawn. “I had hoped I was misreading the weather.”

“You are a magnificent man,” Christine said, the words aching in her throat. “You are everything a woman should want. You are everything I thought I wanted. But you are not the Earl of Westland.”

It wasn’t an accusation. It was simply the truth, laid down without malice.

“It is not about Alagan,” she insisted, though even to her own ears the denial sounded fractured. “It is about me. I am hollowed out, Henry. I spent three years pouring myself into a man who never once asked what it cost me. I have nothing left to give you, and you deserve an entire heart — not the leftover scraps of a ruined one.”

He turned to face her fully and took her hand. His grip was warm, firm. “You are not ruined, Christine. You are recovering from a terrible investment.” A small, bittersweet smile. “I cannot say I’m not heartbroken. I am. But I would rather be disappointed today than lonely for the next forty years, sitting across from a wife who is quietly wishing she were somewhere else.”

A hot tear slipped down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. “I am so sorry.”

“Do not apologize for honesty. It’s rare enough currency in this town.” He released her hand, stepping back to give her space. “But Christine — do not lie to yourself, either. It is very much about Westland. You are still angry with him. And anger, unfortunately, requires a tremendous amount of attachment.”

He bowed, perfectly composed, and walked out of the conservatory, leaving her alone among the orchids, listening to the heavy drip of condensation from the glass roof.

Henry was right, and it took her three days to admit it, because admitting it meant admitting she had refused a good man for the sake of a bad memory she hadn’t finished having. She was angry — furiously, violently angry that Alagan had finally learned how to see her, because it meant her suffering hadn’t been inevitable. It meant he had always possessed the capacity for empathy. He had simply never bothered to spend it on her.

She spent those three days doing everything but think about it. She reorganized her aunt’s linen closet. She read the same page of a novel eleven times. She sat at her window on the second night with a cup of cold tea going colder in her hands, watching the lamplighters make their slow progress down the square, and asked herself, plainly, what she was actually afraid of.

It was not that Alagan hadn’t changed. She had seen the evidence of that with her own eyes — at Lady Leven’s, in the gap he’d opened across a crowded room without asking a single question. It was that if she let herself believe he had changed, she would have to forgive him. And forgiveness, she was beginning to understand, was not a door that swung open all at once. It had to be walked through, deliberately, with the very real risk that the room on the other side was empty after all.

She was tired of being careful. She had been careful with Henry, and it had cost him something he didn’t deserve to lose. She would not be careful about this, too.

She needed to look Alagan in the eye and close the ledger, one way or the other.