Page 127 of A Duchess for his Family

“Oh, darling.” Her mother kissed her cheek. “You might have written. We could have prepared your room.”

“I did not decide until this morning.”

“Then of course you shall stay.”

Her father took her traveling case from the footman despite having several servants whose entire employment appeared designed to prevent viscounts from carrying luggage.

“Your room is exactly as you left it.”

Sophia followed them inside. The entrance hall smelled exactly as she remembered. Everything familiar. Everything unchanged.

For one strange moment, Sophia expected to feel restored merely by entering it. Instead, she immediately felt the absence of Benedict. He was nowhere here. That was why she had come.

The realization hurt.

Her mother began discussing breakfast. Her father asked whether she wanted coffee. A footman carried her case upstairs. Sophia answered every question. She smiled. She allowed herself to be fussed over. And all the while, somewhere inside her, misery settled deeper.

She imagined distance might make breathing easier. Instead, she discovered that Benedict’s absence occupied space just as completely as his presence.

At breakfast, her father complained about the weather. Her mother complained about a neighbor. Sophia stirred her tea until it went cold. At one point, her mother asked whether Rivermere’s cook prepared kedgeree differently.

Sophia stared at her. “I beg your pardon?”

Her mother frowned. “The kedgeree.”

“Oh.” Sophia looked down at her plate. “Yes. Slightly.”

Later, she escaped upstairs. Her old room received her with quiet familiarity. Sophia sat upon the edge of the bed. For several minutes, she did nothing. Then she looked around.

This room had once been the safest place she knew. She spent years retreating here whenever the world became too loud. Her books waited for her. Silence comforted her there. Nothing had ever been demanded. Now the room seemed strangely small. It was not wrong in any sense of the word, simply no longer entirely hers.

Sophia lay back upon the bed. She stared at the canopy overhead. Then, a memory came without permission. Benedict was standing beneath the ballroom chandeliers. His hand was around hers.

You have always known what this marriage was.

“Yes,” she whispered into the empty room.

She knew what the marriage had been meant to be. That was the problem. It had become something else to her. And she had no idea how to make it smaller again.

Sophia turned onto her side and curled beneath the familiar quilt, still wearing her traveling gown. She told herself she only needed a few days, a few quiet mornings, a few nights without hearing Benedict’s voice in the corridor and a little distance in which to clear her head. Then, she would return to Rivermere sensible again.

She would remember the arrangement. She would find some way to live beside Benedict without wanting what he could not give her.

Sophia pressed her face into the pillow. It smelled faintly of lavender, exactly as it had when she was a girl. For the first time since arriving home, tears finally slipped free. She let them.

And somewhere beneath every sensible assurance she had made since leaving Rivermere lay a truth Sophia could no longer deny. She had not come home because she needed to remember who she had been before Benedict.

She had come because loving him had begun to hurt too much to stay near him.

Chapter Thirty-One

Benedict stood outside the nursery holding a tray of biscuits.

This was, by any reasonable measure, a poor decision. Supper was in less than an hour. Cook would disapprove. Mrs. Bell would disapprove. Benedict himself had repeatedly explained that biscuits before supper were unnecessary, disruptive to appetite, and not to become a habit merely because Marjorie could make herself look tragically underfed at will.

Yet there he stood, with six biscuits. He looked down at them. Butter biscuits, still faintly warm from the kitchen, their sugared tops catching the light from the corridor windows.

Sophia would have laughed. The thought came so quickly that his chest tightened. She would have looked from the tray to him, lifted one eyebrow, and asked whether Rivermere’s laws concerning pre-supper nourishment had been formally amended or merely abandoned under pressure.