Page 50 of Atone, Adonis

“He is.”

“Do you think he…wanted me to make him stay?” She didn’t know exactly what she was asking as she stumbled over the words but Fred seemed to grasp her meaning well enough.

“No. I don’t think he did. He wouldn’t have gone if he didn’t think it was a good idea.”

“How can you know?”

He turned his wineglass stem slowly between his fingers. “Because he loves you, Jules. And because, for all his dramatics and manipulations these last weeks, I don’t think he’s ever been ill-intentioned. Just short-sighted and feeling the kind of self-pity any of us would feel. Will feel, when our time comes.”

Julianna watched his fingers move. They were competent fingers, those. Ones that could hem and chop and cradle. “I don’t know that I’d call his behavior dramatic exactly.”

Fred’s eyebrow came out to make its point before his lips said a word. “Wouldn’t you? We may as well be living in a penny-novel for all his sturm and drang.”

“He was just trying to protect me.” And then she found herself saying words she hadn’t intended to say. “There was a man before. And it did not end well.”

“Were you in love with him, this man?” he asked and she heard another question underneath: are you still?

She answered truthfully. “No. I was just lonely. My aunt had died and Thomas was still at war and I…needed companionship. I picked Robert Rothchild, undeniably the wrong man.”

He did not ask what happened, but she told him anyway. “We could only afford one visit to the physician when Thomas came home, already showing signs of illness,” she said. “And on the way back we saw Robert coming out of a tavern.” She paused. “With his wife.”

Fred went very still while she went on. “I remember thinking there must be some mistake. That perhaps she was a sister or cousin. Something sensible.” Julianna laughed softly. “But then he looked directly at me and pretended not to know who I was.”

“Christ, Jules.”

“I stood in the middle of the road with my mouth hanging open like a fool. Tom kept asking what was wrong, and I kept saying ‘nothing’ until I burst into tears and told him everything.”

Fred reached for her hand and she appreciated that gesture, how it helped her to continue with this stupid, awful story.

“The worst part,” she said, “was that Robert soon realized Thomas knew. And once he saw how angry my brother was, he decided there was money to be made from the situation. He threatened to tell everyone he’d had his way with me if Tom didn’t spend most of his Army back pay to buy the cad’s silence. Money we desperately needed, gone in a flash because I had been foolhardy enough to believe a liar. And that was that. My only romance, built entirely on a lie.”

“Shall I kill him for you, Jules?” Fred asked.

Which made her laugh of all things. And once she began she couldn’t stop. She laughed until tears came down her face and she felt slightly hysterical.

“No need,” she finally managed when she’d caught her breath again. “He’s already dead. But Fred, I did mean it when I asked you to only ever be honest with me. I don’t think I could take being lied to again. Not by you.”

The footman removed their plates and brought roast chicken with mashed turnips and leeks dressed in butter. Plain again, as requested. She wished she could take some comfort in the food but she couldn’t. She could hardly eat a bite, although she tried anyway.

“What did Thomas say to you?” she eventually asked. “Before he left.”

“That if I hurt you again he would crawl back out of his grave and make me regret it. I meant what I said, Jules. He does love you.”

“I know.”

She did know. She loved him too, that was never the question.

Who she was outside of her brother and his illness, that was a question. As was: Who might she be when the men who surrounded her weren’t forcing her hand in one manner or another? And: What would life be like now if they’d trusted each other with the truth from the very start?

She looked at Fred then—properly looked. At the fatigue still etched around his intensely blue eyes. The grief he was trying to hold still inside himself. The control he wore so rigidly it had become almost indistinguishable from the rest of him. She didn’t think it was innate, that bizarre sense of rigidity he had now. Because it hadn’t been there before.

“Fred, are you unhappy coming back here?”

He blinked, as if the question were in some foreign tongue and he required a moment to translate it. But he finally said, “Yes.”

Her heart sank a little at that. Dorset was the place she loved most. And one her husband loathed. “You truly hate it so much?”

He took a sip of his wine. She knew he was stalling and she let him do it. She wanted him to be certain of what he said next.