Emmeline folded her gloved hands in her lap. She told herself not to speak. It was not her place. She had been pulled into his family’s disaster by accident, nothing more.
And yet she remembered Lady Juliet. Not well. Only from one or two assemblies, where the young lady had seemed sweet, quiet, and almost painfully eager to be agreeable. Emmeline remembered a soft smile, a nervous laugh, and the impression of someone who felt everything more deeply than she was allowed to show.
Her concern slipped past her caution.
“Is Lady Juliet all right, do you think?” she asked quietly.
The Duke’s gaze shifted to her at once. “All right?”
“I only meant…” Emmeline hesitated, aware of the danger in prying into a matter that was not hers. “We have met before. Not intimately, of course, but she seemed very gentle. I cannot imagine she would have done such a thing lightly.”
His expression hardened. “You cannot imagine it, yet she has done it.”
“Yes,” Emmeline said softly. “Which is why I wonder what must have driven her to it.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw.
The silence in the carriage changed. It grew tighter, charged with something more than inconvenience. She saw then that he was not merely angry. He was afraid, though the fear had been forced into the shape of control.
“She was not driven,” he said. “She ran.”
Emmeline looked down at her hands. “Perhaps she felt she had no other way to be heard.”
His eyes sharpened on her.
“You believe she was right to run?”
Emmeline drew a slow breath before meeting his gaze. “I believe no one should be made to marry against their will.”
The Duke’s jaw tightened, and the air inside the carriage shifted with it. The quiet was charged in a way that made Emmeline suddenly too aware of the space between them.
“She was not forced,” he said. “She understood what was expected of her.”
Emmeline held his gaze, though something in her chest pressed tighter at the certainty in his tone.
“And yet she ran,” she replied.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The Duke leaned back slightly, though there was nothing relaxed in the movement, his broad shoulders still holding that samerigid control she had seen from the moment he stepped toward her.
“You do not know the situation,” he said.
“No,” Emmeline agreed, her voice softer now, “but I know what it is to stand before something that feels… wrong, even if everyone around you insists that it is right.”
His eyes sharpened at that. “Andyouwould still choose duty.”
Emmeline’s breath caught. She should not have said that. She should not have let him see even that small piece of her. And yet?—
“I would choose what must be done,” she said. “Yes.”
The words came out steadier than she felt, but something in her chest twisted as she spoke them. They sounded colder now, spoken aloud, than they ever had inside her own mind.
The Duke watched her for a long moment, his gaze searching in a way that made her pulse quicken, though she could not have said why.
“And you think my sister right for not doing the same?” he asked.
Emmeline shook her head slightly. “I think your sister… brave.”
