She would not cry. She did not cry because a man refused to let her in. She did not cry because the voice of the man she had married had cracked on a single word, and the sound of it had broken something inside her that she did not know how to fix.
She pressed harder. The tears came anyway.
His voice. The way it had caught on that single syllable, sharp and fractured, as though the word itself had betrayed him, was heart wrenching. She had heard voices crack before, under grief, under anger, under the strain of holding too much inside for too long. But this had sounded different. Not like a man losingcontrol of his emotions. Like a man losing control of his voice itself, as though the machinery of speech had seized for one terrible second before he forced it back into place.
She did not understand it. She filed it away beside every other piece of the puzzle that was Hugo Beaumont: the deficiency Lord Sudberry had mentioned, the portrait of his mother…
She did not have enough pieces yet. But the shape of something was forming in the dark, something painful and old and carefully hidden. And the fact that he would not let her see it hurt more than any of the individual pieces ever could.
She thought about Edward kissing Sophia’s temple over a cleared dinner table. She thought about her father reaching for her mother’s hand in a carriage. Thirty years of marriage were distilled into a gesture so small and so automatic that neither of them noticed they were doing it.
She would never have that. Not with Hugo. Not when the deepest part of him remained behind a locked door, and the key was one he would not give her, no matter how long she waited or how gently she asked.
She wiped her face. She undressed. She climbed into bed and pulled the covers to her chin. Lily stared at the connecting door between her chambers and his.
It remained closed.
She turned away from it and closed her eyes. The last thing she heard before sleep took her was the distant sound of a glass being shattered in the study below.
CHAPTER 33
“You are avoiding me.”
Hugo looked up from his desk.
Lily stood in the doorway of his study, dressed for morning calls in a green pelisse. Her hair was pinned neatly. Her expression carried the controlled composure of a woman who had rehearsed this confrontation and intended to conduct it without trembling.
“I am working,” he said.
“You have been working for five days. You take breakfast in your study. You dine in your study. You come home after I have retired and leave before I wake.” She stepped inside but did not sit. “That is not work, Hugo. That is strategy.”
He set down his pen. She was right, and the fact that she was right irritated him, because the entire point of the avoidance had been to make it look like something other than avoidance.
“I have a great deal of correspondence.”
“You have a great deal of cowardice.”
The word landed between them like a slap. Lily held his gaze, and Hugo saw the cost of the accusation in the tightness around her mouth and the brightness in her eyes. She had not come here to fight. She had come here to reach him, and the fight was what happened when reaching failed.
“Lily.”
“Do not. Do not say my name in that tone, as though you are about to explain something I am too fragile to hear.” She folded her arms. “I want to begin my travels. Now. Not next year. Not after more appearances. Now.”
“We agreed to wait.”
“We agreed to a great many things that no longer seem to apply.” Her voice did not shake. Her chin did not drop. “I will not pretend anymore that staying in London like this is enough for me. Living in the same house as a man who will not look at me, who will not speak to me, who will not tell me what I did wrong…”
“You did nothing wrong.”
“Then why am I being punished?”
The question hung in the air. Hugo pressed his palms flat against the desk and breathed through the tightness in his chest.
He wanted to tell her the truth. He wanted to say that the avoidance was not punishment but protection, that every hour he spent in this study instead of beside her was an hour he spent convincing himself that she deserved better than a man with a broken voice and a broken past and a talent for destroying the things he cared about most.
She didn’t deserve to be doomed with him.
He said none of those things.
