The words were so unexpected that Frances scarcely breathed.
“A girl,” he added. “My sister.”
The baby shifted softly in the cradle, and both of them looked toward her at once. She did not wake. After a moment, Andrew continued, though his voice had changed, growing lower and more distant.
“She lived only a few days.”
Frances’ throat tightened.
“I was ten,” he revealed. “Old enough to understand more than anyone wished me to, and not old enough to be told anything plainly. The house went silent. My mother recovered, in the way people said women recovered, but she was never quite the same afterward. My father withdrew. The cradle vanished. No one spoke of the child again.”
Frances watched him, unable to look away.
“So, I learned to do the same,” Andrew sighed. “Not speak of it, not ask, not remember where anyone could see.” His gaze rested on the sleeping baby. “But when a child is unwell, I find I am ten years old again, standing in a corridor, listening for a cry and terrified it will stop.”
There was no sharpness left in Frances. All the anger from earlier, all the hard certainty she had clung to, softened painfully inside her. The questions still existed and the same secrets still stood between them. But now there was this, too: a boy in a silent house, a baby sister who had lived only long enough to leave a wound no one had allowed him to name.
“Oh, Andrew,” she whispered.
He looked at her then, and the guardedness in his face wavered. Frances did not think. Thinking would have stopped her. Thinking would have reminded her that their marriage was an arrangement, that they had argued only hours ago, that he had secrets he still refused to share, that she had meant to find the truth herself.
Instead, she rose. She crossed the small distance between them and put her arms around him. Andrew went utterly still. For one suspended moment, Frances thought she had made a terrible mistake. His body was rigid beneath her hands, and his arms unmoving at his sides. Heat rushed to her face, and she almost stepped back at once.
Then, slowly and carefully, as though surrender cost him something, his arms came around her. He did not hold her tightly. His hands settled at her back with an almost hesitant restraint, as if he feared she might vanish if he moved too suddenly. But then his breath left him, long and uneven, and his hold changed enough that Frances felt the weight of it everywhere.
She closed her eyes. The room was dim and warm. The baby slept nearby, making small, congested sounds now and then. The fire shifted softly in the grate. Andrew’s shirt smelled faintly of cold night air and sandalwood, and beneath it, something that was simply him.
Frances had meant the embrace as comfort. She had not expected to need it herself.
For several quiet seconds, neither of them moved. Andrew’s cheek rested near her hair. His breathing slowed by degrees. Frances felt it happen, felt the tension leave him in small, reluctant increments, and something inside her answered it with a tenderness so sudden that it frightened her.
At last, sense returned. She drew back, but not far enough. That was the second mistake.
She intended to step away entirely, but Andrew’s hands loosened only enough to let her move, not enough to separate them. Frances found herself standing close before him, so close she could see the faint shadow of exhaustion beneath his eyes, the slight roughness at his jaw, and the place where his self-command had not quite been restored.
His hands remained at her waist. Hers rested against his chest. Neither of them seemed to know what to do with that fact.
“Frances,” he whispered.
Her name was scarcely more than breath. It did not sound like a warning now.
She looked up at him. That was another mistake, perhaps the worst of all.
His expression had changed. He looked at her as though something had opened before him that he had not known how to want until it was there.
Frances’ pulse became unsteady. She should have moved. She knew that. She was a sensible woman. Or at least she had once considered herself one. Sensible women did not stand in nurseries at midnight with their hands on their husbands’ chest, gazing up at him as though the entire world had narrowed to the warmth of his palms and the question in his eyes. But she did not move.
Andrew’s gaze dropped to her mouth. The movement was small, barely anything. Frances felt it like a touch.
He leaned in the slightest degree. It was not enough to kiss her, only enough for the air between them to change. Her breath caught, and she knew he heard it, because his hands tightened at her waist.
She could have stepped back then. She did not.
She thought of every reason she ought to, such as the arrangement, the secret, her own resolve and the danger of mistaking grief for tenderness and tenderness for something far more difficult to survive.
Still, she remained.
His face was very near now. It was close enough that she could feel the warmth of his breath, close enough that the next moment, had it come, would have changed something between them neither could easily pretend away.
