“Don’t,” Felix said. The interruption was abrupt, but he could not help it. “You don’t need to explain yourself.”
Rose looked at him then, really looked, and he had the sense she saw him as he was: thin-skinned, brittle, all his pride scorched away.
She said, “I don’t want to be your enemy.”
He could not answer.
A log settled in the fireplace, sending a shower of sparks up the flue. The noise filled the space, as if the house itself wanted to rescue them.
Felix set down his knife and fork. “I am not trying to make an enemy of you,” he said. “I am only trying not to… to make it worse.”
Rose’s lips parted, but she did not speak. Instead, she pushed her plate away and folded her hands.
He tried again. “If there’s anything you need?—”
She cut him off, quietly, “What I need, Felix, is for you to stop disappearing.”
That was the heart of it. He could see it now, in her eyes. The pain of it, the shape of it. She was a woman who had already been abandoned by her parents, tossed away to a convent to be forgotten. And here he was, abandoning her to the walls of Carden House and to their marriage, leaving her all alone.
He wanted to tell her he was doing it for her. That the last thing he wanted was to break her, or Lizzie, or the fragile peace they’d bought at such cost.
Instead, he said, “I’m not very good company these days.”
Rose’s mouth twisted. “Neither am I.”
The staff appeared with the next course, but Rose shook her head. “Take it away, please.” She stood, smoothing her gown. “I have a headache,” she said, though it was a transparent lie. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Felix rose, a second too late. “Of course.”
He watched her go, her spine a line of pure will. She did not look back.
The footmen cleared the table, resetting every dish, every glass, as if for a guest who would never arrive. Felix stood at the window and watched the night close in, the world beyond reduced to shadows and rain.
He poured himself a brandy and drank it in one go. The taste was bitter, but he welcomed it.
He was alone again, and for the first time, he understood what it meant.
He spent the rest of the evening in the study, surrounded by the detritus of a life he no longer recognized. Letters from parliament, bills from the estate, a sheaf of invitations to events he would never attend.
He sat at the desk and wrote nothing, stared at nothing, until the fire died and the house grew cold around him.
Somewhere in the distance, he heard Lizzie’s crying, sharp, indignant wail, demanding attention.
He waited for it to fade. He did not go to her.
He was not sure he ever would again.
CHAPTER 20
For Rose, the week was an experiment in survival.
She threw herself into Lizzie’s care with manic precision, similar to the energy that once marked the worst of her convent days. Each morning began in the nursery, with the act of coaxing the baby awake from her linens and warming milk to precisely the temperature that soothed and never scalded.
If the child fussed, Rose was there, hands steady, voice a metronome of comfort. She cataloged every feed, every evacuation, every twitch of a feverish brow, as if by charting the details she could arrest the drift of her own life.
She did not see Felix.
That is, she did not see the Felix who used to share breakfast with her, whose presence had once pressed against the atmosphere of any room he entered. The Felix she saw now existed in echoes and absences: the creak of a floorboard, theresidue of smoke in a corridor, the drift of masculine cologne in the air late at night. If he passed by the nursery, he did so as a shadow flicking across the frosted pane of the hallway door.
