everything. He’d finally asked Louisa because he didn’t want to end up like me, alone, in love with someone he’d never be able to have.
Something shifted inside me. The place that had been filled with worry for Alice filled instead with the dark, murky waters of jealousy. Daniel was marrying while I, once again, was without the man I had grown to love.
If I couldn’t feel happy for him, I should at least feel happy for Louisa. I forced a smile and hoped it didn’t look like a grimace.
“When is the wedding to be?” my mother asked.
“As soon as possible. We see no reason to wait longer than it takes for the banns to be read.”
She frowned. “Daniel, we will need more than a few weeks. Alice will not be fit to attend, and her health is my first priority at this point. I shan’t be able to assist in the preparations at all. What will Sir Edward and Lady Rosthorn think?”
“It was they who suggested it.”
At my mother’s doubtful look, Daniel continued, “It isn’t as though this is a surprise. I believe Lady Rosthorn has been preparing for the wedding for at least half a year.”
“She’s probably in such a rush because she’s afraid you’ll put it off longer,” I said.
“Margaret!” my mother chided, but my father chuckled.
Daniel glared at me, and I shrugged. “You said yourself Lady Rosthorn is already prepared. How fortunate you could love someone for so long and have everything work out perfectly.”
“Margaret, really,” my mother said.
“Excuse me.” I stood. “I really am happy for you, Daniel. More so for Louisa, that she doesn’t have to wait any longer. I’m going to check on Alice.”
As I left the room, Daniel muttered, “She could have at least acted happy.”
“Don’t judge her too harshly, Daniel. Not now,” my father responded quietly.
Thirty-Eight
As the sun rose the next morning, I passed under the arbor and surveyed the small garden before me. Every bloom seemed tired, heads hanging, wearied from the long summer as though they, too, had felt the burden of the past week. I moved toward the bench, but stopped at spotting the bare spots of rough wood where the paint had flaked off. Even the paths felt more narrow and confined, as though the garden had shrunk in the days I’d been away.
I sat on the bench in defiance. Nothing had actually changed. Everything was just as it ought to have been.
Only the last time I’d sat on this bench had been because Lord Williams had pushed me onto it when he’d thought I was ill. It seemed so long ago, as if the memory belonged to someone else.
He couldn’t have thought I was actually ill. He must have been teasing, just a part of his attempt to win me over. It must also be why he’d asked me to call him by his first name.
Such an intimate thing, someone’s name. The way it embodied the whole of a person, the way Gregory conjured memories with just a word: a river, a rose garden, a smile inviting me to draw nearer, inviting me to focus on those lips, to hope for things that could never be.
Foolish names. I stood and strode out of the garden, down the path to the lake. Plucking a leaf from one of the trees that stood unmoving in the windless morning, I walked out onto the few rocks jutting into the lake, realizing that even the birds sang in hushed tones. Yet there, on the water, was the reflection I had so missed, the one the river could never provide. I was home.
But as I stared at the water’s mirror of the trees and the clouds and the sky, I realized the clouds appeared brown instead of the white they were in reality. The sky, too, was tinted a shade of green.
The murkiness of the water distorted the colors, making things appear different than they were.
I tossed the leaf into the lake. It sat unmoving, not even taking on enough water to sink.
The lack of movement mocked me. Had the lake always been so lifeless? So unchanging? And that smell—it wasn’t the freshness of water in the sun but the stink of decay and stagnation.
No. It couldn’t be. It was just today, just this moment—it was because there was no wind, because I’d been away, because of everything that had happened. Soon the lake would be what it had always been.
I left the rocks and continued my walk. But the more I