His Unchosen bride
Just a kind of quiet, deliberate attention, as if he were reading something and didn’t want to miss a line of it.
He was close to forty, she knew—old enough that people had stopped expecting him to marry for anything as impractical as feeling. There were fifteen years between them, easily, maybe more. It should have made the moment feel wrong. Instead it felt oddly steadying, the way his gaze didn’t flicker or apologize or perform.
Then he looked away, and the moment folded itself back into the noise of the party, and she told herself she’d imagined the weight of it.
At half past nine, the string quartet quieted. Arthur Blackwood took the small stage at the front of the ballroom, tapping his