“For being kind to Clio,” he said. “I daresay she would have enjoyed it much less if she had returned to England only to be trapped with only me in a house for days on end. You’ve made her return so much more pleasant. And she’s told me that she already regards you as a sister.”
“I feel the same about her,” Phoebe said. “But—I don’t think you’re right about her being unhappy if it was just you here. You do realize that she loves you, right?”
He looked like these words hurt him more than a jab from any kind of blade.
“I know,” he said, the words quiet. “Likely more than she should.”
It was Phoebe’s time to feel a jolt of pain. Shehatedthat he felt that way. Why did he feel that he didn’t deserve something as simple as a sister’s love?
She decided that the risk of speaking was less than the dangers of remaining quiet.
“Aaron,” she asked, reaching out to touch his hand, forgetting her fear that touching him would make her lose her head. “Why do you do that?”
He at least had the grace not to pretend he didn’t know what she meant.
“Phoebe,” he said, shaking his head minutely. “Don’t. Please.”
“I don’tunderstand,”she lamented, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “You act as though you’re hiding a sin from the world, but it’s the opposite. Why do you hide your goodness?”
He flinched—outright flinched—at that.
But Phoebe still could not hold back.
“The soldiers at the rehabilitation home—they told me that you pay for the whole place,” she told him fiercely. “They told me that their previous place was terrible, and that even then, they were in constant peril of losing it. They told me that you gave them security that they otherwise would have lacked.”
“It was the least I could do,” he said. “Those men… I led some of them into battle myself. And now, they are injured—some of them so desperately injured that they are entirely insensible to the world around them. And I?—”
He cut off his speech and waved an arm around the splendor of the household.
“I have all thisandan able body,” he said. “I would not blame them—not any of them—for loathing me for it.”
It gutted Phoebe how wrong he was.
“They don’t hate you, Aaron,” she said, and then, when he looked like he was going to object, she seized both his hands in hers and tugged until he looked directly at her. “They don’t. They told me. They admire you.”
He scoffed, but she wondered if that wasn’t hope in his eye, buried deep beneath the discomfort. “They would hardly say otherwise to my wife,” he objected.
She gave him a skeptical look. “They didn’t need to say anything at all. We were playing cards; I wasn’t precisely plying them for details. Any admiration they expressed, they did so of their own accord.”
He didn’t respond, though he squeezed her fingers in a seemingly frantic gesture.
She pushed. It was just who she was.
“Why do you hide your kindness, Aaron?” she asked quietly. “Why don’t you let anyone see it?”
This time, he jerked out of her grasp, his face twisting into an expression of anger, though it reminded Phoebe of the way a small, injured animal might hiss even as someone offered it aid.
“You do the same thing, you know,” he protested.
Ah. Just like the small animal, her husband had sharp teeth.
“I do not,” she protested.
“Oh, yes you do,” he countered, leaning in. “You act as though you are immune to the censure of others. You’re Phoebe Warson! You don’t care about the rules.”
She tensed at the sarcasm in his tone.
“I don’t,” she said. “I mean, there’s human decency, yes, but the arbitrary rules of Society? Idon’tcare about those.”
