Alexander took a step towards her, but she put out a hand to stop him.

  “No.” She shook her head, her gaze pinning him in place. “You had years to tell me, to say something. But instead you ran off to London, hiding away from all of this, as though the world here should cease to turn in your absence. Did you think I would never find out? Did you think I was such a fool that—”

  “Julia—”

  “I’m not finished!” Her voice reverberated through the room. Alexander didn’t take another step, nor did he give any indication of trying to interrupt her again. So she swung her legs over the side of the bed and she sat there, gripping the edge of the mattress as she leaned slightly forward, holding herself back from committing some act she couldn’t even fathom. “I have every right to this anger. I have buried children who never took a single breath. I have etched their names on my heart and they sit there inside of me like scars. And I hate your wife,” she spat, the venom in her voice burning through the air. “I hate her for so easily being able to do what I could not.”

  She stood up then. She wasn’t worried about collapsing again. The worst of the shock had worn away, and now it was only rage flowing through her veins, pumping through her heart, filling her lungs to shape the words that flew out of her mouth. “Perhaps it’s unchristian of me to feel so. Perhaps I should be more charitable, more forgiving, having been the wife of a vicar, a supposed man of God,” she added, each syllable like the shot from a pistol. “But for seven years I lived with someone who tore me down piece by piece, only to have him turn around and use those blocks to build a stronger foundation for the woman he loved. The woman who wasn’t me. Me, his stupid, useless wife. His wife!” she cried, her voice tearing at the back of her throat.

  “And you!” She pointed a finger at him, her hand remarkably steady despite the fury frothing inside of her. “I know what you’ll say. That you thought you were protecting me, shielding me from some great hurt. But — oh!” Her hands flew to her head, and she wished she could tear out her hair, or rend her clothes into rags, or wreak any kind of destruction on herself or something close to her. “All this time, I kept looking at Zora, seeing something in her face that seemed so familiar to me. I thought I was only imagining it. I thought…” Her arms fell back to her sides. “How could they do this to us? How could two people who claimed to love each other cause so much pain to those around them?”

  “I don’t know, Julia.” Alexander sounded defeated, and she tried not to dwell on how many years he had spent nursing his own injuries, keeping everything secret so as not to bring harm to Zora by revealing her mother’s transgressions. “And I loved her, or at least I thought I did.” He shrugged, as if he was unable to provide a better explanation than that. “I cared for her in the beginning. I wouldn’t have asked her to be my wife if I hadn’t. And I thought…” He closed his eyes. “I thought my love might be enough even after I realized I had made a mistake, that she didn’t… that she would never love me in return.”

  Julia wondered which was worse, to love someone as Alexander had, and be hurt by them when their love went unrequited? Or to enter into a marriage without any expectation of great affection, as she had with Frederick, and slowly lose herself beneath the onslaught of his disdain? “How did you find out about the affair? Did she simply look you in the eye and tell you?”

  “I had always suspected she was carrying on with someone else. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but you can only ignore the evidence for so long.” He spoke as though every word caused him fresh pain, as though he was scraping the scabs off old wounds to tell her what she wished to know. “When she told me she was pregnant, I knew… Well, I know what’s involved in the conceiving of a child, and seeing as how I hadn’t been welcome in her bed for several months before that… Anyway, I had no idea she and Mr. Benton were lovers. When he first came here to Barrow-in-Ashton, when she so stubbornly fought for him to be given the post, she had claimed it was because their families had been old acquaintances in Cornwall, that she wished to repay them for a past kindness by giving him the living. For years, I watched them work together, and nothing untoward ever crossed my mind. But the entire time, she drifted away from me. Oh, in public she was always the perfect wife, made Langford shine like a jewel. But in private, I knew how much she despised me, and for the life of me I could never figure out what I had done wrong. Unfortunately, my only sin seemed to be that I wasn’t… him.”

  Julia understood that sensation, that particular pain. That nothing he could have done would ever have been good enough.

  “And then Zora was born.” A blast of sound issued out of him, not quite a curse and not quite a laugh. “I was smitten from the moment I laid eyes on her. This tiny thing, helpless and pink and squalling. And I held her in my arms, and I loved her from the start. So, of course, Anna chose that moment to tell me about your husband, that he was Zora’s father, that she had been in love with him for half her life. She was almost gleeful about it, like it gave her so much joy to inflict pain on someone else. On me.”

  He turned and began to pace again, but he only made it a few steps before he arrived at the fireplace. He reached out to the mantel with a grip so fierce Julia thought he might tear the wood free of the wall if he was so inclined. “But I didn’t tell you. Because I cared about you. Because I was afraid to hurt you. Afraid of exactly this! I thought… Christ, Julia. I don’t know what I thought.”

  She wanted to go to him. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to take every single one of her husband’s letters and use them to light a fire that would burn through the rest of the night. And still she was angry, without even knowing for certain who was fueling the majority of her rage.

  Her husband, she realized. The man who had married her because she was there, because she was convenient, and all so he could keep up the appearance of a holy man of God complete with a biddable wife and family — a family she was never able to provide — while quietly, secretly carrying on a years-long affair with another woman.

  Except her husband was gone. And so was Mrs. Halberd. The only person left at whom to direct her ire was Alexander, and he’d been hurt just as much. But she couldn’t let her anger dissipate. She didn’t want to. It felt good to hold onto it after so many years of allowing her life’s failures and disappointments to wash over her again and again, as though she was little more than a stone to be slowly worn down.

  “It was not your decision to make, to choose whether or not I could handle the truth.” She walked towards him, close enough to smell him, to feel the warmth emanating from him. To reach out and touch him, if she wanted. “All these years, you could have told me. Instead, you hid away, cowering behind your pain—”

  “Of course I was in pain,” he shouted back. “Do you think I don’t feel my heart twist every time I look into my daughter’s face and I’m not there? And how exactly was I supposed to tell you? In a letter? To your face? Perhaps I should’ve invited you to tea and we could have discussed their affair over a plate of lemon biscuits.”

  “Oh, don’t be absurd…”

  “If you’re allowed to be angry then I’m allowed to be absurd! You’re not the only one who was hurt, Julia!”

  “But you’ve known for years!” she countered. Years for the pain to lose its edge, for it to transform into something dull and negligible, that would not slice into him anew every time he thought of it. “You’ve had time to—”

  “To what?” A step forward from him and there was hardly any space left between them. “Accustom myself to my wife’s infidelity? To the fact that my daughter was fathered by another man? The pain doesn’t lessen. It changes, and it’s shaped itself around my life, my every thought, but it never truly goes away.”

  It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She did not want hard truths and dire reality. She wished to be told that everything would get better, not that her very character would be shaped by all of the injuries, large and small, received from those around her.

  “I can’t do this.” She dropped her chin to her chest, her teeth working at a cracked bit of skin on her bottom lip until she tasted blood. “I feel trapped.” She looked up at him, her eyes wide and aching. “You’ve trapped me here. Because I don’t want to leave you, and I don’t want to leave Zora, but I’m not sure…” She sighed, heavy enough she feared she might fall through the floor with the weight of her troubles. “I will look at her, and I will see Frederick, and I will see the faces of all the children I lost. And I don’t want to feel this way. It’s not her fault. None of it is. And yet…”

  Alexander placed his hand on her arm, a light touch above her elbow. Like a spark to tinder, it set her aflame. She batted him away, but then placed her own hand on his chest, above his heart.

  “Don’t,” she hissed. “I don’t want your comfort.”

  His gaze burned into her, twin coals in the stark wound of his face. He looked battered and raw, and she realized this was how he truly appeared beneath the mask he wore for Zora and others. This was the damage he took such pains to hide away, the agony he had never dared to show to her before now. “Julia, I’m—”

  “No.” And she pushed him a few steps back until he hit the wall, the letters falling from his grasp, scattering across the floor. Her hand remained on his chest, her fingers climbing upwards to the rumpled folds of his neckcloth. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Not yet, please.” She grabbed the fabric at his collar, holding onto it like a rope about to drag her up from the drowning depths.

  She dragged his mouth down to hers and she kissed him. She kissed him because she wanted to taste the heat of his mouth, feel the thrust of his tongue against hers. There was the slide of his teeth on her bottom lip, and she urged him to bite, to send a shiver of pain through her.

  “Julia,” he said. Like it was a plea, like a prayer. “Do you want this?”

  She nodded, her hands moving down, down, down. Over his chest, over his abdomen, wrenching at the buttons of his waistcoat, sending one of them to the floor while the others dangled from their loosened threads. She struggled with his shirt, pulling it out from the waistband of his trousers so that she could run her fingers across his skin.

  He was hot beneath her touch, or maybe her hands were cold. But she wanted to wrap herself around him, wanted to submerge herself in him. It was either that, or continue to rail against the two people who could not be there to answer for their sins.

  His waistcoat landed on the floor. The shirt went next. Julia took in the sight of him then, the bare planes of his back and shoulders, the shadow of hair across his chest, trailing down to where she could not see. For years, her husband had told her that one’s naked body was a shameful thing. Adam and Eve absconding from the Garden of Eden, covered in fig leaves. But she wanted to look at Alexander. She wanted to revel in the sight of him, every inch of his skin bared to her, a statue of gold and shadows waiting for her touch.

  She slid her hands over his ribs, then across his back. He turned away from her, guided by her fingers, by the scrape of her nails down the length of his spine. He groaned and leaned towards the wall, his head resting on his forearm, while she wrapped her arms around him, embracing him from behind. She wondered if he wanted this, needed this as much as she did. It wouldn’t be gentle lovemaking. She had no need for soft caresses and whispered words. She wanted to hear his desire for her roar from his throat. She wanted to feel the slick of his sweat, the bite of his teeth. She wanted him to make her feel seen.

  Her arms still around him, she reached down towards the front of his trousers, for the buttons there. He was hard and ready for her, so very ready. He swore as she slid her fingers up and down his length, as her thumb grazed his tip and the bead of moisture gathered there. When she leaned against him, his hips pressed back into hers, urging her to press harder in return. And still she stroked him, while her free hand moved down to the cleft at the top of his thigh, while she grazed her teeth on his shoulder and felt her nipples tighten as they rubbed against him.

  “Dammit, Julia… Dammit!” He came with a jerk of his hips, his cock pulsing in her palm. She heard his heavy breathing, the litany of swears that fell from his lips, the soft thump of his head as it came to rest on the wall between his braced hands. They stood like that for a minute, Julia still holding him from behind, enjoying how well it felt to have his buttocks nestled so snugly against her front. She thought they might be done, that something of a reprieve had been earned by that quick burst of passion, but once Alexander had control of himself again, he turned around to face, moving so fast she couldn’t catch her breath before he swept her up and carried her over to the bed.

  She gasped as she fell back across the end of the mattress. He’d already pushed her skirts up past her knees by the time she levered herself up onto her elbows. She parted her thighs for him, arching her hips upwards as his hands burned a trail over the skin above her stockings.

  The sound that came out of him at that moment, a low rumble in his chest, as though he’d gone feral. Onto his knees before her, his fingers spreading her open, and she felt his breath kiss her there before his lips, his tongue took over.

  Her fingers tangled in his hair as he licked her, as he tasted her. She held him there, not wanting him to stop until he’d driven her over the edge. “Please,” she begged, letting her head tip back as she gripped his hair so tight she feared it might hurt him. “God, please!”

  And then… he stopped. She jolted in surprise, only to open her eyes and find him standing again, his knees resting on the edge of the bed as he pulled her hips towards him and settled his cock at her entrance.

  “Yes?”

  She nodded, and that was enough. Not even a hitch of her breath before he was fully inside of her, their hips joined together as he held her there, just for a moment.

  “Alexander,” she panted, and squirmed beneath him. The fullness of him embedded in her made her want to cry out her release right then and there. She looked up at him, and an understanding passed between them. She needed this as much as he did, this… untangling of something that had always been there, a shadow keeping them apart for the last dozen years. “Please,” she said. “Don’t be gentle.”

  He leaned down and kissed her. A soft touch of his mouth to hers, at first. And then he drew her bottom lip into his mouth, biting down as he pulled his hips back and thrust into her again.

  She reached up and gripped his shoulders, not only to hold onto him but to show that she trusted him, in a way that she never had with her husband. With Alexander, she could deliver herself into his power without fear, fear that he might use that power to control her, to hurt her against her will. To destroy her.

  Even though she’d given him leave to be rough with her, there was still a carefulness underlying his every touch, a kind of safety net letting her know that should she fall, he would always be there to catch her.

  His hands sought out her hips right before he came, and he urged her to wrap her legs around him, caging him in as his thrusts became more intense. She tightened around him, unable to hold off any longer before she broke apart, just a moment before he cried out and collapsed over her.

  Julia held him tight, drawing him the rest of the way onto the bed with her. Beside them, the single candle on the nightstand still flickered, casting shadows on the walls and highlighting the lack of a fire in the fireplace. Alexander wrapped himself around her and she listened to the mingled racing of their hearts and the soft rush of their breathing, all while realization dawned that the household was still going about its evening business around them.

  Did everyone know Alexander was in her room, that he had come to check on her after Zora had told him she was unwell? She pressed her cheek to his chest and closed her eyes, wanting to stretch out this moment while also batting away the fear that it would come to an end, and all too soon. But they hadn’t been quiet, neither their argument nor their lovemaking afterwards. If no one had suspected there being something between herself and Alexander before, she doubted the same could be said now. He had been alone with her in her room, with the door closed, for an extended period of time. Had they been overheard? How many had seen him come in here?

  No, no. She couldn’t think about that now. She needed at least a few more minutes of peace before having to step out and face a world in which everything seemed to have tilted off its axis.

  “I’m sorry,” Alexander whispered against her hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

  She placed her hand on his cheek, her thumb tracing the deep fissure of worry etched in the corner of his mouth. “You’ve carried it for too long on your own. I wish—” But she winced at that. As he had already said, there was no good in wishing for things to be different. The choices they’d made, and the actions of those around them — for good or ill — had succeeded in bringing them to this moment. With Alexander’s arms around her, with Zora blossoming in her care.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked. When she shook her head in confusion, he went on. “With Zora?”

  Ah, that power he possessed to pluck at her thoughts without her having to say a single word about what was in her head at that moment. “I will be, of course. I hope you don’t think that I would leave her because of this. That I would leave you. But I was angry. I still am.” She had to say it, to acknowledge the rage that still coursed through her. “Not with you, not really. And certainly not with Zora. But… with everything else, I think. It was too much, all at once.”

  He swept her hair back from her forehead and kissed the path his fingers had cleared. “I hope you don’t think I was calm and collected when I found out. I fear I was not myself for quite some time after learning my wife was carrying another man’s child. But it wasn’t until Zora was born, until I held her and she…” He scraped the back of his hand across his brow. “Christ, I was a lost man after that. I’d have done anything to protect her, to prevent her from knowing what a mess she’d been born into. She was this small person who wanted nothing more than love and care, and that — at the very least — I was able to provide for her.”