No one argued. That made it worse.
She left the nursery and went to the sitting room, where her manuscript waited upon the writing table. Writing, she decided, was the proper remedy. Writing demanded thought, discipline, structure. It did not ask questions one could not answer. It did not look at one with blue eyes and say nothing when truth was required.
She sat, took up her pen, and attempted to return to the troubles of her heroine, who had been left in a ruined abbey with a missing letter, a suspicious aunt, and a villain whose motives had grown regrettably complicated. Frances read the last page twice, found it entirely unfamiliar, and dipped her pen.
For several minutes, she wrote nothing. Then she wrote one sentence.
The house felt empty without him.
Frances stared at it. Her face warmed with immediate indignation.
“That,” she told the page, “is not at all relevant to the abbey.”
She crossed it out. Beneath it, she tried again.
The child’s absence was felt most acutely in the rooms where her presence had once seemed smallest.
Frances set the pen down.
“Oh, very well,” she whispered.
There it was: not fiction at all.
She leaned back in the chair and pressed one hand over her eyes. She missed them. The admission came not in one grand, tragic sweep, but in a hundred small betrayals. She missed the baby’s weight in her arms. She missed the way Andrew’s voice softened when he asked after her. She missed the sound of his step in the corridor, the low murmur of him in his study, the steadiness of him across the breakfast table, even when silence sat between them like a reproach.
She missed him so much that it frightened her. For it was one thing to be angry with a man one did not love. It was quite another to be angry with a man whose absence had taken all the warmth from the house.
At that moment, she heard a knock at the door. Frances got startled, then hastily gathered several loose pages as though a servant might care that her heroine had been abandoned in emotional disorder.
“Come in.”
The footman bowed. “The Duchess of Thorne and Miss Norton, Your Grace.”
Frances stood at once. Emma entered first, lovely and composed beneath a bonnet trimmed in dark blue ribbon, though her eyeswent over Frances with the swift tenderness of an elder sister who had never believed in waiting to be invited into distress. Sophia followed close behind, pale and anxious, clutching her reticule as if it contained courage.
“Frances,” Emma greeted
That was all. It was enough.
Frances lifted her chin. “You have come very early.”
“It is nearly noon,” Sophia pointed out softly.
“Then you have come with very little warning.”
Emma removed her gloves. “Yes.”
Frances looked from one sister to the other. “How delightfully direct.”
“We were worried,” Sophia admitted.
Frances attempted a smile. “How unnecessary.”
Emma’s gaze moved to the crossed-out page upon the writing table, then to Frances’s face. “Is it?”
Frances turned away to ring for tea, though she had no desire for it. “I am perfectly well.”
“Of course,” Emma agreed. “That is why you look as though you have slept badly, eaten worse, and quarreled with every pen in the house.”
