“I don’t wish to disturb you,” Lily murmured, shaking her head.
Kate glanced over, features hard. “If it would disturb me, I wouldn’t have inquired. Tell me whatever you like.” She turned back to the piano, her playing unaffected by her addressing Lily.
She was clearly more gifted than Lily gave her credit for.
Holding her breath a moment, Lily felt the practiced perfection in her pose slip, easing against the back of the chair. “I want children. I want a baby, Kate. And in order for that to happen, I need to have that conversation with my husband.”
Kate hissed slowly through her teeth as she turned the page of her music. “Would it be so impossible with Granger?”
“I don’t know,” Lily groaned, putting a hand to her brow, then lowering it to her lips as she looked out the window to the garden where a few of Kate’s children were playing. “A few days ago, I would have said yes.”
“But… ?”
Lily bit her lip, slowly releasing it as her thoughts began to turn the last couple of days over in her mind. “I don’t know,” she said again. “We weren’t going to come to London for the Season this year. It didn’t interest either of us.”
“And yet, here you are.”
“Granger came to see me while I was playing the other morning,” Lily told her. “Normally, we live as separate as strangers, apart from dining together. We send messages across the house if there is a more urgent matter that cannot wait for meals. But that day… He was more like the man I’d known before our marriage.”
Kate nodded thoughtfully, her eyes still on the page. “Well, that sounds promising, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not certain.”
The playing on the piano stopped just before the coda, and Kate turned on the bench, staring at Lily with her dark eyes. “You aren’t certain?”
Lily grimaced at her expression. “Does that make me horrible? I ought to be certain about my husband, surely.”
Kate laughed a little, pushing up from the bench and coming back over to her. “I think you forget with whom you are speaking. I had no affection for my husband when I married him. At all. And that did not change for some time after we married. We detested each other and made no efforts to amend that. If I was certain of anything about my husband, it was that he was the vilest of creatures.”
“I had forgotten,” Lily murmured, thinking back to her earliest days in London. Back then, Kate had not been Kate but Katherine, and she had been cold, proper, and reserved. It was simple enough to forget that the two women were the same, as they were so different from each other, and Lily had only ever known this kind, warm, open version of Lady Whitlock.
Perhaps she might understand the turmoil Lily had been feeling in the last few weeks and certainly since Thomas had begun to speak more.
“I would love my husband to be the husband I wanted from the beginning,” Lily admitted with a raw honesty she hadn’t expected. “But I am so accustomed to being disappointed that I can’t bring myself to truly hope… He spoke as though he wanted to go to London with me, not as though he was already going to go to London and I could come along. I don’t know why, and I don’t want to know why.”
Kate reached out to take Lily’s hand, rubbing gently. “You’ve hoped and been disappointed one too many times to trust hope any longer. I know.”
Lily met her eyes, confused by the admission. “You hoped? I thought you despised Lord Whitlock.”
The tender smile that crossed Kate’s face made Lily ache to be able to do the same. “I did. I also found him impeccably handsome and hoped he would appear, swearing he was in love with me one day. I would never have admitted that, of course, but it was true.”
“I want my husband to love me,” Lily whispered. “Heaven knows, I have loved him.” Tears began to fill her eyes, and she looked down at their clasped hands, sniffling softly before laughing. “I haven’t cried over him in a year.”
“It won’t stop even if you do find a marriage of affection,” Kate warned gently, gripping Lily’s hand tightly. “Your husband will bring on your tears for a variety of reasons and emotions, if there is love between you.”
“That’s not particularly encouraging.”
Kate laughed once. “With Derek, I cry tears of laughter. I cry tears of tenderness. I cry tears of joy. He doesn’t hurt me anymore, at least not with intention, and if he is aware of a hurt he caused, his apologies make me cry as well. The tears are different, Lily, as is everything when more of your heart gets involved. I am not telling you not to wish for love, I am telling you that crying over your husband is not something for which you should be uneasy. Or ashamed.”
Lily blinked back the tears, managing a weaker version of her smile. “Emotion over one’s husband is frowned upon in Society, Lady Whitlock.”
“Society has had quite enough to say about my emotions for my husband, thank you, Mrs. Granger.” Kate smirked wryly, patting Lily’s hand once more before drawing back. “And what do you mean by speaking as though you do not presently love your husband?”
The question took Lily aback, stopping her heart for a moment. “I beg your pardon?”
Kate gave her a look. “You said you have loved him. Have. Loved. So you do not love him now?”
Lily opened her mouth, but there were no words for her.
Did she love her husband? Still? Now?
Had she stopped?
“I don’t know,” Lily heard herself say. “Is that so terrible?”
Kate shook her head very firmly, elegant dark tresses swirling in their curls about her face. “Love is confusing, and that is a paltry statement.”
That was true, and Lily knew it well. She had been in love with Thomas for at least a
