Frances drew a breath.
“I already told you that,” he continued. “That is proof I have not lied to you.”
“No,” she answered slowly. “Perhaps not.”
“Perhaps?”
“A withheld truth is not always so far removed from a lie.”
“It is when speaking it would endanger someone.”
“Who?”
His jaw tightened. Her questioning everything infuriated him, and thrilled him at the same time.
Her eyes softened with frustration rather than victory. “You see? There is always another locked door.”
He sighed, then raked his fingers through his hair. “Some things cannot be explained.”
“At least not to me.”
“At least not yet.”
The words surprised him. They surprised her, too. He saw it at once. There was a small change in her expression, a flicker of hope she tried to hide before it fully formed.
Not yet.
He had not meant to offer even that much. But there it was.
Frances leaned slightly forward. “When?”
“When I can.”
“That is no answer.”
“It is the only honest one I have.”
She studied him for a long moment. Candlelight moved across her face, deepening the faint shadows beneath her eyes. He had noticed them earlier. He noticed them more now. He also noticed the slight pallor beneath her color, the tiredness at the corners of her mouth, all pointing to the strain of a woman trying to be brave in a house that had given her too little reason to rest.
Guilt pressed into him. He had told himself he was protecting her by withholding the truth. Perhaps he was. But he was also leaving her to wander through consequences without a map.
“Please, just… trust me,” he urged.
Frances’s lips parted, then closed again. She looked down at the table, at the ruined little pieces of fowl she had cut and never eaten.
“Trust is not so easily given.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” She looked back at him. “Because you ask for it as though it were a handkerchief I might pass across the table.”
“I do not ask lightly.”
“But you ask blindly.” Her voice was quiet now, which made it worse. “You ask me to believe that your silence is honorable, that your secrecy protects the child, that your distance protects me,and that none of it conceals something that may one day make me regret every soft feeling I have allowed myself.”
He said nothing. There was nothing safe to say.
Frances looked away first. For a moment, neither moved. The room around them remained elegant and still, absurdly indifferent to the dangerous intimacy of the conversation. Andrew could hear the clock on the mantel counting seconds with merciless precision.
