Page 128 of A Duchess for his Family

Benedict could almost hear her voice. He heard her everywhere. Four days had passed since Sophia left for Keswick, and four days since he’d found her note on his desk.

She needed a few days away, to clear her thoughts. That was perfectly reasonable, perfectly understandable, and entirely his doing.

Benedict had spent the first day telling himself he ought to respect her request. The second, he had convinced himself that distance might benefit them both. By the third, he had discovered that Rivermere without Sophia was an intolerably large collection of empty rooms.

Her absence had edges, and he kept walking into them. At breakfast, his gaze went instinctively toward her chair. In the garden, he found himself looking toward the restored flower bed. Yesterday, he had entered the drawing room intending to ask whether she wished to walk before remembering, with humiliating delay, that she was not there.

He missed her. There was no dignified manner in which to arrange that truth. He simply did. And beneath the missing lay something worse.

Guilt.

He had hurt her. He knew it now with a certainty he had resisted while she remained before him. Sophia’s face during the dance returned whenever he allowed silence to settle too deeply.

What I do not know is whether I can bear it.

Benedict closed his eyes. He could still have stopped it then. He could have told her the truth, that the distance had not come from regret or that he had withdrawn because wanting her had become frighteningly easy.

Instead, he reminded her of their arrangement, as though affection were a clause in a contract that could be struck through when inconvenient. He watched hope disappear from her face. And then he allowed her to believe he meant it.

Benedict looked down at the biscuits again. His brother would have called him an idiot. And politely. His brother had possessed no talent for polite criticism when it came to Benedict.

The memory brought the old familiar ache. It did not arrive sharply anymore. Time had softened its entrance. That did not mean it hurt less.

Benedict remembered another corridor years ago, another door, another moment in which someone had stepped into a room and changed everything.

His brother was dead. It still felt impossible and absurd. For weeks afterward, Benedict had continued expecting him, expecting a laugh from the stable yard and a ridiculous story delivered over brandy.

Grief had taught him something he had never managed to forget. One could become accustomed to another person’s existence so completely that losing them felt less like losing someone and more like discovering the world itself had been constructed incorrectly.

A biscuit slid slightly across the plate as his hand shifted. Benedict stared at it.

“This is absurd,” he muttered.

Then he knocked. Three seconds passed.

“Come in!” Marjorie chirped.

Benedict opened the door. The nursery was warm with late afternoon light. A fire burned low in the grate despite the mild weather, and the windows stood partly open, letting in the scent of damp grass after an earlier shower.

Amelia sat cross-legged upon the rug surrounded by papers. Marjorie lay upon her stomach beside her, apparently drawing something involving a horse, a castle, and several flames.

Both girls looked up. Their eyes dropped to the tray. Silence followed, then Marjorie shrieked. “Biscuits!”

Amelia’s entire face lit. “Before supper?”

Benedict had been greeted with less enthusiasm upon returning from several-week journeys.

“Yes.”

Marjorie scrambled upright. “Are you ill?”

“No.”

“Have you struck your head?”

“No.”

“Is supper canceled?”