Page 20 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

“So tell me,” she said, and though her voice still wavered at the edges, there was a new steadiness beneath it now, something that had clearly been waiting rather a long time for its moment. “Why now? Why have you come to me after all these years with apologies and remorse, as though they might be of any practical use to me now? What, exactly, do you expect me to do with them?”

Charles did not answer. Indeed, he could not. He sat very still, his hands clasped so tightly one might have worried for the circulation, his expression bearing the unmistakable burden of a guilt that had not, she suspected, been newly acquired. It had been with him for some time, settled in as comfortably as any unwelcome guest who had decided he had no intention of leaving. She could not decide whether that made him more forgivable or less so, only that it made everything rather more real than she had any desire for it to be.

And then, without warning or any apparent decision on his part, Charles reached across the small distance between them and drew her into his arms.

She did not mean to accept it. She had every intention of maintaining what single shred of her dignity remained after laying herself so bare. But then his arms were around her, warm and familiar in a way that undid something in her she had spent a great many years carefully keeping in place. Suddenly she found, to her considerable annoyance, that she did not want to, in fact, going to withdraw at all.

Instead, she pressed her forehead against her brother’s shoulder and began to cry. Something unrestrained and altogether undignified and entirely beyond her ability to govern.

Charles did not speak. Of course he did not. He had always possessed the admirable sense to recognize when words would be an intrusion rather than a comfort. So he simply held her, without hesitation and without complaint, while she fell apart in his arms in a manner she had taken great care to avoid for the better part of a decade.

She cried for mornings she could not seem to forget, and for the child who had once stared fixedly at a flaw in a perfume bottle and simply waited for the world to stop hurting. She cried for the twelve-year-old girl who had decided that disappearance was something she deserved, and for the young woman who had stood at her mother’s grave and felt nothing at all except a curious and shameful relief, only to spend years discovering that freedom was not the same thing as escape.

She cried for everything she had never said, for everything she had never permitted herself to feel, and for all those years of perfect composure carefully performed for audiences who, in retrospect, had not deserved so much as a single moment of her time.

She cried because her brother was holding her, and because he was sorry, and because sorry did not undo a single thing that had already happened between them, though she had known that perfectly well from the start. But still, it seemed, she had needed to hear him say these words out loud.

Somewhere in the street below, life proceeded exactly as it always had. The coffee beside her went cold without comment, and Caroline Bingley, remained in her brother’s arms.

She did not let go for a very long time.

Chapter 10

August 11-15th

The morning after her cry with Charles, Caroline descended the stairs prepared to be mortified. Truly, she ought to have been. She had wept in her brother’s arms with all the composure of a child who had taken an unfortunate tumble, and she had spoken aloud sentiments she had spent the better part of ten years locking firmly inside her own chest, where they could not inconvenience anyone, least of all herself. By every known measure of her personal sensibilities, she should have reached the bottom step draped in mortification from head to toe.

Instead, she felt strangely light.

It was the most curious sensation, as though some thoughtful hand had removed a stone from the space between her shoulder blades while she slept and then neglected to leave a note of explanation. She paused on the final stair and examined herself most carefully, expecting embarrassment to appear at any moment, much like a misplaced glove that simply must be hiding somewhere close by.

It did not appear.

What she found instead, upon entering the breakfast room and discovering Jane already at the table, was an impulse so foreign to her usual habits that she very nearly glanced behind her to confirm it had been directed at her. Before she could summon her better judgment to forbid it, she smiled at Jane. It was a small smile, perfectly measured, with nothing that could be accused of sentiment or softness. Yet it was undeniably genuine. Jane’s eyes widened for a brief instant before she returned the smile.

She poured her coffee. She ate her breakfast. She announced, to no one in particular, that she was going out.

London in August was supposedly dull, or so declared those who imagined they ought to be elsewhere. The season was finished, the fashionable world had fled to their country retreats, and the remaining residents moved about with the air of people who had meant to depart but had somehow failed to do so. Caroline had always found this version of the city oddly pleasant. London lost none of its charms and quite a few of its most inconvenient inhabitants, which, in her view, made it vastly improved.

It was not, objectively speaking, not a very remarkable scene, but Caroline found it rather lovely all the same.

She had rounded the second turn of the south path and was occupied with admiring a particularly well-behaved spaniel when she very nearly walked straight into Edward Reinhart.

He looked as startled as she felt, which was to say not very. She had the immediate and rather inconvenient impression that he had not been startled at all and had merely arranged his features to give that impression. His coat was an excellent charcoal wool, he held his hat in one hand with the careless grace of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin, and his expression upon seeing her shifted with astonishing promptness from polite surprise to something unmistakably pleased.

"Miss Bingley," he said, his voice warm in a way she found far too ready for an accidental meeting.

"Mr. Reinhart," she returned, narrowing her eyes and straightening her posture with practiced elegance. "How extraordinarily convenient."

"Is it?" he asked, falling into step beside her with that effortless manner of his that somehow made it seem as though the encounter had been planned without the slightest element of planning involved.

"You are stalking me," Caroline said in a tone of perfect pleasantness.

"Am I?" He looked at her with a sincerity so earnest she suspected it had to be at least half fabricated. "And if I were to admit it, would that make you run away?"

Caroline considered this with admirable gravity, although she could feel her mouth threatening to betray her with the smallest hint of amusement. "On the contrary," she said at last. "You ought to be the one who is frightened. I am not the sort of woman one simply makes disappear without consequences."

He laughed so suddenly and so completely that the spaniel she had been admiring turned to look at him, which Caroline felt was a perfectly reasonable response. She had noticed, over the course of their recent acquaintance, that Edward's laugh had a particular quality to it. The quality of a man who found things genuinely funny and saw no earthly reason to moderate this. It was, she had decided, simultaneously one of his most appealing and most aggravating characteristics.