Page 68 of A Lady’s Guide to Subterfuge and Science

“I’d like to help you rewrite your paper,” he said, voice low. “If we can’t track it down, I mean. And only if you’ll allow it.”

“Are you angling for a second author credit, Booth?”

He chuckled. “I assure you, I am not. It’ll be all you.”

“But you’ve nothing to gain.”

“No. But I’d like to help you, because—because those theories of yours make you light up from the inside, Kalila. It’s one of the first things I noticed when we met at the university. It would be a shame if we let that spark of yours go out.”

You could love him. Isn’t that terrifying?

Kalila bit her lip, unsure how to respond. She had never in her life been spoken to like this. His tone was almost reverent and so sincere that it almost brought her to tears.

“The kiss didn’t work,” he said abruptly.

A sigh fell from her lips. “Yes, well.”

“Was it your first?” he asked. “Kiss, I mean.”

Unable to control herself, Kalila snorted. “Please. I’ve done far more than kiss.”

Oh, well done. Why not tell him the whole sordid tale?

Oliver brightened with incredible speed. “Is that so?”

Why not tell him the whole sordid tale? What harm would it do? The waning light was comfortable, and she so wanted to tell someone. She had held it inside her for so long, and there had never been the right time—or the right person to tell it to.

And, like she had told him in the shed, she was tired.

“Yes,” she whispered. “With Edward Morris.”

The story tumbled out of her in soft, sad tones. She’d met Edward the summer of her nineteenth year. He’d been twenty-two, visiting his grandparents from town. Kalila had just received her first microscope for her birthday and had been desperate to excitedly and unabashedly share her knowledge with anyone who would listen. Edward had always listened and with great patience.

“Catch of the village that summer, then,” Oliver said with a frown.

“I thought so,” Kalila murmured. “I thought myself so in love with him, so I did whatever he asked. I dressed and did my hair to his liking and gave my affections to him freely. Very freely. And I kept it all a secret, so it wasn’t as if anyone knew.”

“A secret?” Oliver repeated. “Why?”

Kalila shrugged. “It made everything all the more thrilling. I did plan on telling my family, once everything had been decided. But for all of Edward’s patience, he soon tired of me. He wanted to temper me, and I did my best to please him. But some things just can’t be tempered.”

Oliver sighed. “Kalila—”

“It’s fine,” she said, the words coming out harsher than she’d intended. “And tired or not, he did propose, eventually.”

“Oh?”

“But something he said—that he’d allow me time to practice microscopy once we were married—suddenly I was wide awake. I didn’t care a whit about the other things, but science was—is—everything. I couldn’t be—”

“Stifled,” Oliver said. “You said you didn’t want to be stifled. At Regent’s Park.”

He remembered.

“Precisely. Of course, he’d been stifling me all along. It was only once my work was threatened that I realized what he’d been doing.”

“So you turned him down,” Oliver said. “Clever girl.”

“I turned him down. And I swore I would never risk being stifled again. But it seems so often to come hand in hand with love, doesn’t it? For women, I mean. Edward told me as much, that I would always be expected to choose between science and my role as a wife and mother. It’s the one thing he told me that I cannot help but believe.”