33. CHAPTER 33
T hat night, when he came through the connecting door, she was ready.
She had been sitting at the edge of the bed for twenty minutes, still in her evening dress, choosing her words.
"You want children."
It was not a question.
He set his brandy down on the dressing table and did not sit.
"What makes you say that?"
"The way you looked at Lord Hartfield's child. The yearning in your face was painful to watch."
He stood there and let the silence stretch.
"The truth, Val."
He sighed.
"What do you want to know, Vivienne?"
"Why you refuse to make a baby with me."
His jaw tightened. His hand went to the back of the chair beside the dressing table, and his knuckles whitened against the wood.
"I do want a family," he said. His voice was low. Strained. "With you. I have wanted it for longer than you know."
She crossed to him and laid her hand on top of his.
"I want it too. You may think that because of my amnesia I don't know my own mind. I do. This is not a fleeting want. I don't yet have all the words for it. But it is not temporary. "
He looked down at her hand on his. He lifted it to his mouth and pressed his lips to her knuckles. Once.
"I know you do," he said. "But it is impossible."
"Why?"
"It just is. You will have to trust me."
"You are trying to control me again."
"I'm trying to protect you."
"You are deciding for me with no explanation and no regard for what I want."
"Sometimes what we want is not what is best for us."
She pulled her hand from his. Not violently. Precisely.
"Do you hear yourself? I'm not a child. I'm a grown woman, and my decisions are my own to make. Unless you believe I lack the capacity."
"Please don't return to that. I have already told you I do not consider you feeble of mind, nor will I ever — "
He cut himself off. Rubbed the back of his neck.
"You just don't have the information."
"Then give me the information and let me decide."
"Your decisions don't affect only you. They affect me as well."
"Likewise, Valentine. The decisions you are making affect me. Yet you make them alone. If they affect us both, we should make them together. With the same information. So tell me."
"I can't. It would only upset you."
"I'm already upset. Not knowing is worse than knowing. In almost every case, what I imagined was worse than the truth turned out to be. I will not hide from ghosts anymore. Tell me."
"You have endured more than — "
"Yes. And I have survived it. Stop treating me as if I were fragile."
"You are too precious for me to risk — "
"You cannot protect me from every harm. It is hubris to think you can."
"Maybe not every harm. But the known risks, I can."
She went still. They were getting close .
"Like the risks of childbearing," she said. "I know your mother died in childbirth. Other women, like Lady Hartfield, have children safely."
"It is not the same. For you, the risks are higher."
There it was.
"Did I almost die in childbirth?" She had to force the next question out. "Did we lose a baby?"
"Three."
The word came out as if torn from him.
"Three babies?" Her hand went to her chest as her voice broke on the last syllable.
"Three pregnancies. We never had babies."
"Does that make it easier?"
"I don't know. It was not easy. Each loss tore a piece of my heart out. But losing a child already born would have been worse. And losing you — " he stopped. Swallowed. "Unbearable."
He had weighed the risk against the reward, and he had chosen her life over the possibility of any other.
"We could try again," she said, and held her breath.
He shook his head. Not a refusal. The misery of a man who could see no path forward that did not cost him something he loved.
"I can tell you what happened," he said. "But I cannot make you understand the pain. I'm not sure I want to. Perhaps — "
"What?"
He went back to his room, crossed to his desk, and returned with a small leather-bound book in his hand.
"There is something I need to return to you."
She took it. The leather was soft, worn at the spine. She could feel the indentation where a clasp had once been.
"What is this?"
"Your diary. You used to keep one. I think you will find it illuminating."
"Venus mentioned a diary. I looked for it but could not find it." She stared at the book. "You had it all this time?"
"Yes. "
"Why did you not give it to me before?"
"I didn't know you were looking for it. And I was trying to protect you from what is in it. But you should have it."
"You have read it."
"Yes." A pause. "Forgive me. I thought you were dead, and the diary was a way to keep you near."
She looked down at the book.
"There is nothing in there I didn't already know, Vivi. The events, the feelings. I lived them with you. But your words helped me see the parts I could not see from where I was standing."
She closed her fingers around the diary.
"Thank you. For returning it. I would like to read it before we continue this conversation."
"I understand." He walked to the door. He paused there and looked back.
"Who you were is who you still are. In that regard, nothing has changed. Which means our clash of wills will continue."
There was a weariness in his voice that chilled her. They had fought this war before, and he had known the moment he came into the room tonight that he would be fighting it again.
She held the diary against her chest.
"Good. That is what I want. A man who will face me as an equal. Not one who decides for me in the name of protection."
He inclined his head and went out through the connecting door, closing it behind him.
She sat on the bed with the diary in her hands for a long time. She breathed in the smell of old ink and leather and, faintly, his cologne. He had held this book for seven years, reading her words in a house that no longer had her in it. He had kept it in the drawer beside his bed.
She pressed her face against the cover.
Then she opened it.
Her breath caught at the first sentence. The handwriting was hers. The voice, the phrasing, the loops of the letters. And the woman who had written it had loved her husband without reservation. Had been happy, and had known it, and had wanted to set it down somewhere safe.
The early entries were full of small, ordinary joys. His dry remarks transcribed with obvious delight. A picnic at the cove. The first ball she had hosted as a duchess. Vivienne turned the pages. The first year went like that. Light. Easy. Full of the particular happiness of untested love.
Then a different note crept in.
April 12th, 1854
A child. I am almost certain. I have not told Val yet — I want to be sure.
She read it twice. The hand was steady, but excited.
She turned the page.
May 30th, 1854
Lost. There is no other word for it, and I will not look for one. Val held me through the night and did not speak. I think he was afraid that any sentence he tried would be the wrong one. He was probably right.
Vivienne closed her eyes. Then opened them and kept reading.
Two more entries of the same shape, eighteen months apart, the language sparser each time, the writing pressed harder into the paper. By the third, the woman who had once filled pages with picnics was writing in fragments. Lost again. He is not himself. I am not either.
By 1858, the diary had changed.
March 14th, 1858
I asked him today if he would consider trying again. He said no. Just no. Absolute. Immovable.
June 2nd, 1858
Venus says I must be patient. That he is frightened. I understand. I am frightened too. But his fear gets to decide. Mine gets to be managed.
September 30th, 1858
It has been over a year. He withdraws. Every time. Even when I beg him not to. He holds himself apart from me at the very moment I need him most, and then he holds me afterward as though tenderness can replace what he has withheld. It cannot. It cannot.
Vivienne sat still, the diary open in her lap.
He withdraws.
She could have written the same words this morning. It was the same pattern.
She turned to the last entry.
January 3rd, 1859
Val says we must wait. That my body needs time to recover. He says it as though it were a medical fact. But it has been almost two years. I have been waiting for four years to hold a baby in my arms. How much longer before he trusts my body to do the thing it was made to do?
She stared at the page through tears.
She had assumed the obstacle was new. That his refusal had to do with her amnesia, her recovery, the strangeness of their situation. That once she remembered, once she was herself again, the door would open.
The diary said otherwise. That door had been closed for years. The woman she had been, with all her memories intact, had sat at her desk and written these very words and wept the same tears that were flowing from her eyes now.
She closed the diary.
She didn't yet know what she was going to do.
The conversation she thought was starting tonight had been underway for a decade. And whatever compromise she had hoped to find at the end of it was a compromise the other Vivienne — the one who had loved him with a whole memory and a whole heart — had already failed to reach.