Page 78 of Atone, Adonis

“Chester is me. He always has been. I’m sorry if you thought otherwise. Or that my personal intentions had anything to do with you. They didn’t. That was never a vow about you. It was about me.”

She closed her eyes at those words. Trying so hard not to let them gut her. “No, Fred. It was about us both.”

And still he gave her nothing.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that it will be best if I go back to Farrow Cottage for a while.”

“You may do as you please, Julianna. You are not my prisoner.”

Julianna. Not Jules. At least, she supposed, he’d stopped calling her Miss Farrow.

She glanced up at him once more. “I don’t want to leave you, Fred. I meant what I said in the carriage.”

“We all say things we don’t mean. I wouldn’t take it too hard.”

She turned away from him. She’d been a fool to think he could put Chester away so completely. And Chester had never been a man she could love. “Tell me then, what should I do? What would you do if your husband had taken his vows in bad faith? If he promised to stop lying and keeping secrets and then kept on doing it? A habit he couldn’t break.”

“They were never in bad faith. I made my vows—to your brother, to myself, and to you, in the very best faith I knew how to keep.”

“No,” Julianna said. “Don’t you dare bring my brother into this.”

“Why shouldn’t I? You know as well as I do that his machinations have been behind all of this. Or did you find yourself standing here in this room for some other reason?”

She closed her eyes against his words yet again. “What do you mean?”

He scoffed at her. “You know what I mean very well, but I’ll repeat it if I must. That I would not ever touch you was the first promise your brother extracted from me. In the same breath he used to demand I ask for your hand.”

Of course it was the same breath, she thought. Thomas had no breaths to spare. It didn’t surprise her that he’d exacted that kind of promise from her husband. He thought he’d been protecting her, because he hadn’t been there to protect her from Robert Rothchild. And that was ridiculous but she could understand it.

That was the issue, wasn’t it? She could understand both of them and still it hurt.

She felt a tear slip down her cheek. “So we were never more than what my brother demanded we be?”

Fred stared at her, blinking. She thought he might reach out and wipe her tears away as he’d done on their wedding day so many weeks ago. But he didn’t.

“I am sorry you are feeling poorly. Gilbert will help you back to Farrow Cottage should you need any assistance.”

And then he turned on his heel and he left.

She made for the stairs, tears flowing freely down her cheeks now. Her hand found the door and opened it, and then she was outside and walking. Past the jumbles of thorn and vine that had once been the striped Galician roses. Past the hedgerows whose leaves were finally beginning to bud. Past the jonquils and buttercups and cheerful oxeye daisies that came up every June, and the primroses and bluebells that should have bloomed weeks ago but who were just beginning to show themselves.

She gathered them as she went, those flowers of early spring whose abundance had been pushed later in the year by the unusually long winter.

Spring always came, she reminded herself, as she picked her way along the muddy paths back to Farrow Cottage. It always came in the end, no matter how far away it felt.

Chapter

26

Fred did not follow his wife. He’d stood alone and miserable in the corridor outside Thomas’s room and listened to her footsteps move steadily away. Down the stairs. Through the foyer and out the front door.

She was gone. And it was his fault.

Just like everything else.

Another thing you’ve ruined.

The best thing.