My Husband Ignored Me For Two Years — Until I Wore A Dress That Forced Him To Tell The Truth

Part 2

The tall man in the traveling coat had noticed the shift.

He glanced from Craig to me and back again with the careful neutrality of a man whose profession had taught him not to remark on anything until paid to.

Craig did not seem to be aware that he had stopped speaking.

His hands were still clasped behind his back.

His head was no longer bent.

His eyes, which I had only ever truly seen in profile and at angles, were now fixed on me.

It was a heavy, unwavering gaze.

I had been spoken near, dined opposite, and ridden beside, but I had never been the absolute center of his attention.

I was being looked at now.

I held my glass very still.

The musicians in the alcove finished one slow figure and began another.

Brenda, sensing something she did not understand, lifted her jeweled lens and turned in her chair.

For the first time in my two years in the house, her lens did not find what it was hunting for.

Craig had taken three steps toward me without quite seeming to know he was moving.

He stopped at a distance that was by any measure of the room improper.

He said my name.

He said it the way a man says a word he has only ever read before.

He tested the shape of it in his mouth.

It was as if he had been told the pronunciation by someone who had not been entirely sure.

Megan.

I did not answer at once.

I looked at him steadily and I let him see me looking.

I said evenly that he had not used my name in this house since the night we arrived.

He did not flinch.

He simply said he knew.

There was a small pause in which the gallery, by some collective instinct of the well-bred, decided to look elsewhere.

The cousins drifted toward the punch.

The magistrate’s wife discovered a sudden interest in a portrait.

Brenda sat back in her chair and tapped one knuckle against the carved arm, visibly frustrated to be unable to intervene.

Craig spoke again, his voice much quieter.

He asked if we might step out a moment.

I considered him.

The traveling coat had withdrawn to the punch table with admirable speed.

The candles flickered as a door opened somewhere down the gallery.

Outside, beyond the tall windows, the courtyard lantern swung gently in a wind that had risen since I came down.

I told him the orangery was open.

He inclined his head.

He did not offer me his arm.

I was grateful for it.

If he had touched me at that moment, I did not know what I would have done.

We walked the length of the gallery together without touching.

The air between us was the air of two strangers who have been told by an authority neither respects that they are bound.

The orangery lay at the gallery’s eastern end through a pair of glass doors.

It smelled of citrus leaves and damp brick and the faint trace of pipe smoke.

The lanterns there had been dimmed to almost nothing.

The plants made a soft wall of green between us and the gallery.

Craig closed the glass doors behind us.

He stood with his hands still resting on the brass handle.

He seemed uncertain whether to step forward into what came next or to retreat into what had been.

I watched his shoulders.

They were very still.

I had read that stillness for two years as indifference and boredom.

I was beginning to read it differently now.

He turned.

The lantern light caught the side of his face and showed me a deep tiredness I had not been permitted to notice before.

He started to mention the dress, then stopped.

He tried again, saying he wanted to explain.

I set my glass down on the rim of the fountain.

I told him to explain.

He looked at the floor of the orangery for what felt like a long time.

He was choosing the order of his words with the care of a man defusing something dangerous.

He finally spoke of his brother, and the arranged marriage that was meant to be his brother’s before his sudden death.

He confessed he had stepped into a dead man’s place.

He admitted he had spent two years not looking at me because he was terrified of what he would feel.

I had lived in his silence for two years, but as he asked me to help him open his dead brother’s locked room, I had to wonder: could I dismantle the life I had built to take a chance on a man I didn’t know?