Chapter Thirteen
“You have been avoiding me.”
Helena’s quill stuttered across the page, leaving an unsightly blot of ink on what had been a perfectly composed letter to Mrs Blackwood.
She did not look up. Looking up would mean meeting Edmund’s eyes, and meeting his dark eyes would unsettle her even more.
“I have not been avoiding you,” she said, her voice carefully neutral.
“I have been occupied. There is a difference.”
“Is there?” Edmund’s footsteps crossed the morning room, her morning room, the space she had claimed and rearranged and made her own.
She heard him pause somewhere behind her chair.
“You have taken breakfast in your room for three days. You have declined to join me in the library each evening. You have developed a remarkable talent for being elsewhere whenever I enter a room.”
“Coincidence.”
“Helena.”
The way he said her name, soft, questioning, with an undercurrent of hurt he could not quite hide, made something twist painfully in her chest. She had been avoiding him.
Of course she had been avoiding him. She had spent the past days avoiding him with the desperate determination of a woman fleeing something she could not outrun.
Because she had heard him. In that parlour, defending her to a man who did not matter, with words that mattered more than anything. And she had not known what to do with the knowledge, had not known how to face him knowing what she now knew, feeling what she now felt.
So she had retreated. Had built new walls to replace the ones that had crumbled. Had done what she always did when frightened: she had gotten sharper. More distant. She had pulled back before she could fall further.
It was not working.
“I have been tired,” she said finally, still not turning. “The Season is exhausting. I simply needed rest.”
“You needed rest.” Edmund’s voice was flat. “For the past days. During which you attended two dinner parties, a card evening, and an afternoon musicale.”
Helena closed her eyes. He had been watching. He always watched, she knew that now. He noticed everything about her, catalogued everything, and remembered everything. She had thought it was strategy. She had been wrong.
“Helena.” His voice was closer now. He had moved around her chair, was standing beside the desk where she could no longer avoid seeing him. “Please. Look at me.”
She looked.
He was rumpled, more rumpled than she had ever seen him. His cravat was slightly askew, his dark hair was disordered as though he had been running his hands through it. There were shadows beneath his eyes that suggested he had not been sleeping well.
He looked, she realised with a start, as miserable as she felt.
“If I have done something to offend you,” he said quietly, “I would rather know. I would rather you tell me directly than, this.” He gestured vaguely, encompassing the distance between them, the careful avoidance, and the walls she had reconstructed.
You have not offended me, she wanted to say.
You have undone me. You have made me feel things I did not agree to feel.
You have valued me quietly and perfectly and I heard you say so when you did not know I was listening, and I do not know how to be in the same room with you without wanting to tell you everything.
“You have not offended me,” she said instead. Her voice was steady. She was proud of that, given how unsteady everything else felt. “I have simply been… managing.”
“Managing what?”
You, she thought. Me. The terrifying fact that I hold my husband in my highest esteem, and have no idea what to do about it.
“The Season,” she said. “The situation. Everything.”
Edmund studied her face for a long moment. She saw the frustration in his expression, the desire to press, to demand answers she was not ready to give. But he did not push. He never pushed. He simply waited, patient and steady, giving her space she had not asked for and did not want.
It made her feel worse.
“I will leave you to your correspondence,” he said finally. There was resignation in his voice now, layered beneath the careful courtesy. “I apologise for the interruption.”
He turned to go.
“Edmund.”
He stopped.
Helena did not know why she had spoken. Did not know what she intended to say. She only knew that watching him walk away, watching him accept her distance without protest, was unbearable in ways she could not articulate.
“I am not.” She stopped. Started again. “This is not about you. What I am managing. It is not about anything you have done wrong.”
He turned back. His expression was unreadable, but something in his posture had shifted, a tension she had not noticed until it eased.
“Then what is it about?”
Me, she thought. My fear. My inability to trust that good things might actually be good, that kindness might actually be genuine, that love might actually be possible.
“I don’t know,” she said, which was a falsehood, but felt true. “I am still determining that.”
Edmund nodded slowly. He did not look satisfied, she had not expected him to, but he looked less hurt than he had moments ago. Less resigned.
“When you determine it,” he said quietly, “I hope you will tell me. Whatever it is. Whatever you need. I would like to help, if you would let me.”
He left before she could respond.
Helena stared at the closed door for a long time. Her letter to Mrs Blackwood sat forgotten on the desk, the ink blot spreading slowly across the page.
I would like to help, if you would let me.
That was the problem, wasn’t it? He wanted to help. He wanted to be let in. And she wanted to let him, wanted it so desperately that the wanting itself had become the obstacle. Because letting him in meant vulnerability, and risk. It meant the possibility of loss.
Helena had lost too much already to face that possibility willingly.
***
The days that followed were an exercise in careful choreography.
Helena did not resume her breakfast retreats, which had been too obvious, too pointed, too cruel to continue. But she maintained her distance in other ways. Shorter conversations. Fewer lingering moments. A careful avoidance of the library in the evenings, where she knew he would be waiting.
She missed him.
The admission, even to herself, was humiliating. She lived in the same house. She saw him every day. And yet she missed him, missed the easy conversations over breakfast, the comfortable silences in the library, the way his presence had become the fixed point around which her days revolved.
She had not realised how much she had come to depend on him until she started pulling away.
Edmund, for his part, gave her the space she had silently demanded. He did not press. Did not pursue. Did not mention her withdrawal or question her excuses. He was unfailingly courteous, unfailingly kind, and unfailingly present without being intrusive.
It was driving her to distraction.
She wanted him to push. Wanted him to demand answers, to refuse her evasions, to force her to confront what she was feeling instead of hiding from it. She wanted him to do the brave thing she could not do herself, to break through her walls and make her face the truth.
But that was not Edmund’s way. Edmund’s way was patience was waiting, and allowing her to come to him in her own time, on her own terms.
It was, she realised, exactly what she had asked for when she negotiated the terms of their matrimony. Space, distance, and no pressure to feel or perform or pretend.
She had asked for walls. He had given them to her.
And now she loathed every single brick.
She could not sleep.
It was past midnight, closer to one, by the clock on her mantel, and Helena had been lying in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, her mind refusing to quiet.
She had tried reading. She had tried counting.
She had tried every technique she had ever learned for forcing her brain to surrender to exhaustion.
Nothing worked.
Finally, she rose. If she could not sleep, she could at least be miserable somewhere more comfortable. The library had always soothed her, the presence of all those books, all those stories, all those lives that were not her own. Perhaps it could soothe her now.
She pulled on her dressing gown and slipped out of her chambers, her bare feet silent on the thick carpets. The house was dark and quiet, the servants had long since retired. She moved through the familiar corridors without the need of a candle, navigating by moonlight and memory.
The library door was ajar.
Helena hesitated. Through the opening leaked a narrow beam of firelight, dancing and warm against the darkened corridor. Someone else was awake. Someone else had sought refuge in the same place she had.
She knew who it was. Of course she knew.
She told herself it would be best to return to her room and maintain the distance she had so carefully constructed. Should protect herself from the conversation that would inevitably follow if she entered.
She pushed open the door.
Edmund was seated in his usual chair by the fire, a book open in his lap that he was clearly not reading.
He wore a dressing gown over his shirtsleeves, his feet bare like hers, his hair disheveled.
The fire had burned low, casting shadows across his face that made him look tired and strangely young.
He looked up when she entered. A look of surprise passed quickly across his countenance, before he schooled his features into careful neutrality.
“Helena.” His voice was quiet. “I did not expect, that is, I thought you were asleep.”
“I could not sleep.” She hovered in the doorway, uncertain whether to advance or retreat. “I did not realise you would be here.”
“I am here most nights.” A ghost of his almost-smile. “When sleep proves elusive.”
She crossed the threshold carefully and closed the door behind her.
Edmund said nothing as she crossed to her usual seat, the window seat she had claimed as her own during the evening hours they had spent together.
She curled into it now, pulling her feet up beneath her dressing gown, wrapping her arms around herself against a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
Neither of them spoke and the silence stretched, but it was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people who had grown accustomed to each other’s presence, who did not need words to share space. Helena felt some of the tension in her shoulders begin to ease.
“Do you ever wonder,” she said finally, not looking at him, “if we made a mistake?”
The words hung in the air. She heard Edmund shift in his chair, heard the soft sound of his book closing.
“Do you believe we did?”
“I don’t know.” She stared at the dark window, at her own reflection ghosted against the glass. “I thought this would be simpler.”
“Simpler than what?”
Than losing my heart to you. Than wanting things I told myself I would never want. Than lying awake at night aching for someone who is sleeping behind a closed door.
“Than this,” she said, which was not an answer but was the only answer she could give.
Edmund was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was gentle, so gentle it made her chest ache.
“Helena.”
She closed her eyes. The way he said her name, not for the first time, but somehow different now. Weighted with something she had never heard before. An invitation. A question. A plea.
“Look at me.”
She looked.
He had risen from his chair. He stood in the middle of the library, the dying fire casting him in shadow and light, his expression open in a way she had rarely seen. He was stripped of all reserve, completely unguarded.
“We can be whatever we choose to be,” he said quietly. “The terms we agreed to, they are not written in stone. They can be changed. If that is what we want.”
If that is what we want.
Helena’s heart was pounding. She could feel it in her throat, in her wrists, in the trembling of her hands that she could not quite control. He was offering her something, an opening, a possibility, a chance to rewrite the rules they had established.
All she had to do was take it.
Tell him, she thought. Tell him what you heard. Tell him what you feel. Take the risk. Be brave for once in your wretched, careful life.
But the words would not come. The fear was too deeply rooted, the habit of self-protection too ingrained. She had spent too many years building walls to tear them down in a single moment.
“Goodnight, Your Grace.”
She saw the words land. Saw the flicker of hurt cross his features before he smoothed it away. Saw the hope in his eyes dim and perish.
“Goodnight, Helena.”
She rose from the window seat, and crossed the library on unsteady legs. She did not look at him as she passed, could not look, and could not bear to see the resignation settling into his expression.
In the corridor, she stopped. Leaned against the wall. Closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her face.
Coward, she thought. He offered you everything, and you retreated. You protected yourself instead of reaching for what you wanted. You chose safety over possibility, and now you have to live with that choice.
She walked back to her chambers slowly, each step heavier than the last. The connecting door loomed on the far wall of her bedroom, that barrier she had requested, that distance she had demanded. She crossed to it now and pressed her palm flat against the wood.
On the other side, she heard footsteps. Edmund, returning to his own chambers. She heard him pause, heard the creak of floorboards as he stood near the door that separated them.
He was there. Inches away. Close enough to touch if not for the wood between them.
She wondered if his hand was pressed to the door as hers was.
She wondered if he was standing in the darkness, aching the way she ached.
She wondered if he knew that she had given him her heart, and that she was terrified of that affection, that she had run from him, not because she did not want him but because she wanted him too much.
The footsteps moved away.
Helena stood at the door for a long time, her palm pressed against wood that was slowly warming beneath her touch. Then she pulled back her hand and walked to her bed and lay down and stared at the ceiling until dawn began to lighten the sky.
Neither of them had opened the door.
But neither of them slept.