“Excuse me,” she said.
She walked through the parlor and climbed the stairs. She entered her chamber, closed the door, and locked it.
Newton leaped from her arms to the bed, turned twice, and settled against the pillow, watching her with patient, unblinking focus, as though he understood something was wrong and meant to stay close.
Elinor sat on the edge of the bed. She removed her spectacles and set them beside the celestial atlas. Without them, the room softened into light and shape, and the tears she had held through Lucien’s farewell, Rebecca’s tirade, and the long climb upstairs rose and fell unchecked.
She pressed her face into the pillow and wept, letting out wrenching, gasping sobs of a woman who had lost something she had never been meant to keep.
Something that had grown inside a lie and become the truest thing she had known.
Newton pressed against her side, his purring a steady vibration through the pillow and into her chest, a small, constant comfort.
She cried until her throat was raw and her eyes burned, the pillow damp beneath her cheek. She cried for the children at Lyra House, for the last dance at Lord Haverford’s ball, for the three seconds after the music stopped. She cried for her father’s face when he told her he was glad she was loved, and for the garden where she had not spoken the word that might have changed everything.
She cried for the man who had kissed her knuckles before her stepmother and called it the greatest honor of his life, and meant it, and walked away.
When the tears were spent, she lay on her side, Newton curled against her, her hand resting on the atlas.
The room was quiet. Afternoon light had turned golden, stretching across the bed in long angles.
She closed her eyes.
It is over.
Newton purred. The house settled around her, full of people who did not love her and empty of the one who had.
Elinor drew the atlas to her chest and let the silence fill the space where his voice had been.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“What have you done?” Annabelle stood in the doorway of his study at Fairmont House, her face pale, her hands gripping the doorframe as though she needed it to stay upright.
She had been out when he returned from Morland House, visiting a friend for the afternoon, and the news had reached her before she had removed her cloak.
Lucien sat behind his desk. The brandy decanter stood at his elbow, half-empty, and the glass in his hand was his third. Or his fourth. He had lost count, which was the point.
“Lucien.” Annabelle’s voice cracked. “It is all over the ton. People are saying you went this morning and dissolved the engagement. Tell me they are wrong.”
“They are not wrong.”
Annabelle released the doorframe and crossed the study, her steps measured, controlled. She stopped before his desk and looked at him, her expression a mix of fury, grief, and bewilderment. “Why?”
He had prepared for this. On the carriage ride home from Morland House, his hands still shaking against his thighs, he had assembled the same careful explanation he had given Rebecca.
Mutual decision. Changed circumstances. Respectful dissolution. The words were clean and orderly and revealed nothing.
“Our circumstances changed,” he said. “We agreed that the engagement no longer served either of us. It was amicable, and Lady Elinor?—”
“Stop.” Annabelle’s palm hit the desk. The brandy trembled in his glass. “Do not speak to me like I’m a member of the ton you are managing. I am your sister. I watched you at that ball, Lucien. I watched the way you held her during that last waltz, the way you looked at her when you thought nobody was watching. That was not a man whose circumstances had changed. That was a man who was losing someone he loved.”
The word landed in the room and stayed there, taking up space between them.
Lucien drank. The brandy burned going down, but it did not reach the inhospitable place in his chest that had settled there the moment the door of Morland House closed behind him.
“It was the right decision,” he said.
“For whom?”