“Tell me something,” she said.
“Anything.”
“What does a duchess do in the morning? An ordinary morning, with no emergency and no one requiring anything particular.”
He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “Whatever she likes.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer.” His voice was easy. “My grandmother reads Voltaire in French and writes correspondence and occasionally rides if the weather suits her. My mother used to paint, badly, and then deny it was her painting if anyone found it.” Something shifted in his tone; the warmth of an old loss settled into memory. “The point is it was hers to choose.”
“Hers to choose,” Megan said.
She turned the phrase over. Held it. Examined the edges of it and found them clean.
She thought of Penharrow. Not with the old blind terror, the reflexive flinch, the way his shadow had lived in her body as a physical thing.
She thought about him knowing.
Knowing she was the Marchioness of Astor and would become the Duchess of Saxton. Knowing she would one day be a duchess. Knowing she sat in rooms she could refuse to let him enter, not because she had run, but because she had chosen something and built something and put her name on something that was entirely, irrevocably hers.
She thought about him knowing she was happy.
“He wanted to make me afraid,” she said. “That was always the point of it. Not just the control—the fear. The fear was the thing he was making. He constructed it very carefully and then he lived inside it like a landlord.” She paused. “I don’t think I knew that until just now.”
Oliver said nothing. He was listening in the way he listened, without filling the space she was using.
“And the most complete answer to all of it,” she said slowly, “is not just surviving him. It’s not even escaping him. It’s that he doesn’t get to live in me anymore.” She found Oliver’s hand in the dark and held it, not desperately, just held it. “He made me afraid. I’m choosing to be happy instead. That’s the whole of it.”
He brought her hand to his mouth. Said nothing, because it didn’t require anything said.
Outside, somewhere in the dark, the horses shifted in the stables. The fire breathed and settled.
“Tomorrow,” she said after a while.
“Tomorrow I’ll organize the special license,” he agreed.
“The Duchess of Newbury.” She said the name slowly, the way she had been saying it in her mind since Dorothea’s sitting room, feeling for the edge of whatever it was that made her pulse do what it did at the sound of it. “Do you know her?”
Oliver was quiet for a moment in a way that was different from his other quiets.
“I know of her,” he said. “I know she lost a daughter. A very long time ago.” He paused. “I know my grandmother has been thinking about her for considerably longer than this conversation.”
Megan was quiet.
She did not ask anything further, because there was a quality to the silence that felt like a room she wasn’t quite ready to enter, not tonight, not with the firelight low and Oliver’s hand in hers and the whole extraordinary improbable fact of this—ofbeing here, of being his, of having chosen—still settling into the shape of itself.
There would be time.
She was beginning to understand that there was going to be time for things. That was the other thing she was learning, the one that sat beneath all the others. Not just that she had choices, but that the choices would still be there tomorrow. That she did not have to solve everything tonight.
“Go to sleep,” Oliver said quietly. “Tomorrow will still be there.”
She closed her eyes.
She thought of choices and candles and the locked room inside herself where something small and stubborn had refused, all those years, to stop being true.
She thought,I was right about what I was.
