Just waiting. I will give you 3 days, she said. After that, you will have enough to decide. And I will have enough to decide as well. Because this is not one-sided, your grace.
I need to know things about you, too. He raised an eyebrow. Such as? Why Lady Petra Colen ended your engagement. What actually happened?
Not the version society tells, which has at least four variations depending on who is telling it. Something shifted in his expression. Not pain, exactly. But a kind of careful stillness. You would ask me that directly?
I told you I was a poor liar. I'm also a poor pretender. I do not want to spend 3 days dancing around the things that actually matter. He looked at her for a long moment. She ended it.
He said finally. Because I was not present. Not physically. I attended every dinner, every event, every required occasion. But she said I was never actually there.
Or that she felt she was engaged to a title and a set of obligations, and not to a person. He paused. She was not wrong. Nora said nothing. She let the words settle where they landed.
I have spent 7 years since then trying to determine whether that is something that can be changed, he said. Or whether it is simply what I am. And have you decided? Not yet, he said. But I am more interested in the question than I was before.
The morning light had strengthened by now. Inside the manor, they could both hear the distant sounds of the house waking. Doors opening. The clatter of breakfast being prepared, voices in the upper corridors. Nora handed him back his now empty cup.