Frances looked down into the pale yellow surface of the lemonade. It seemed easier, somehow, to watch the light tremble in the glass than to meet her sister’s eyes.
“I am…” She stopped and began again. “I am less certain than everyone wishes me to be.”
Emma said nothing, and because she said nothing, Frances went on.
“They speak of it as though the thing were settled merely because I agreed. As though consent were peace.” She let out a small breath. “It is not peace.”
How could any of it be peace when she was on the threshold of tying her life to a man she didn’t know, a man who had a secret child he refused to divulge anything about?
“No,” Emma agreed quietly. “It rarely is at first.”
Frances lifted her gaze then. “Were you afraid?”
Emma smiled faintly. “Terribly.”
“You did not seem so.”
Emma smiled. “I was too proud to show it.”
That, at least, was familiar enough to make Frances’s mouth twitch.
Emma folded her hands in her lap. “What is it you fear most?”
The question settled between them with surprising weight. Frances could have answered a dozen ways. She feared the strangeness of marrying a man she did not truly know. She feared Andrew’s reserve, the secrets he plainly carried, and the child at the center of all this mystery. She feared walking towarda life shaped more by necessity than desire. But none of those were her deepest fear.
She looked toward Lilian, who had begun arranging her gathered flowers into groups of importance. Then, her gaze fell upon the cradle, where Emma’s younger child slept in perfect unconscious trust.
“I… am afraid of disappearing,” Frances confessed.
Emma’s expression changed very slightly, as if the answer had not surprised her, only saddened her.
Frances went on before she could stop herself. “I have spent years watching women become what marriage required of them. Softer where they wished to be sharp. Silent where they wished to speak. Smaller, always smaller, until all that remained was what suited everyone else.” Her fingers tightened around the glass. “I do not know how to become a wife without losing the part of me that is myself.”
The words, once spoken, left her feeling at once foolish and exposed.
Emma did not laugh. Instead, she leaned back slightly in her chair, considering Frances with that steady, affectionate intelligence which had always made confession both easier and more dangerous.
“Marriage can demand things,” she revealed. “Compromise, patience, more humility than one would prefer.” Her mouth curved. “And occasional restraint, which in your case may prove the hardest trial of all.”
Frances gave her a reproachful look, though a reluctant smile threatened it.
“But it need not require your disappearance,” Emma continued more seriously. “Not unless you surrender yourself willingly.”
Frances frowned faintly. “That sounds very noble. I am not sure it is useful.”
“It is useful because it is true.”
Emma turned her gaze toward the cradle, where the baby slept one breath after another, as if peace were the natural condition of the world.
“When I married Philip,” she divulged, “I was afraid, too. Not of him precisely, though he was formidable enough to alarm anyone with sense, but of what the life would ask of me, of whether I should still be myself within it.”
“And are you?”
Emma looked back at her. “Without a doubt.”
Frances studied her sister’s face, searching perhaps for some sign that the confidence was forced or borrowed for comfort’s sake. She found none. Emma looked different from the girl she had once been. She was warmer perhaps, steadier and more deeply rooted in herself, but never diminished.
“How?” Frances asked softly.
