The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood
That had always been my reasoning, clean and defensible, the kind of logic that held up perfectly well in a boardroom.
It held up considerably less well lately, for reasons I hadn’t fully let myself examine.
I was passing the library on my way to my study, the house quiet around me, when I saw her through the half open door.
Charlotte was curled into the reading chair by the window, legs tucked beneath her, a book open in her lap, completely unaware that I’d stopped walking. The lamp beside her cast a warm, low light across the page, across her face, across the careful way she held herself even in stillness, comfortable in a manner I rarely managed to feel anywhere in my own life.