"I did not come for coffee," she said. "I came to talk to you."

I did not answer. I knew why she'd come.

Nineteen years before, my mentor and greatest friend, Aloysius Brandon, then a captain, had introduced me to his bride. She'd been a fresh-faced girl of twenty-one, with white blond hair and eyes of gray. Her hair was still as yellow and her eyes still as clear, but her face bore lines of grief, etched there by the loss of her three children, none of whom had lived past their first year.

My own dark hair had threads of gray in it, and my own face held lines of pain. Louisa had been there for every single one of them.

I rested my arm on the crumbling mantel and let the fire's warmth ease the ache in my leg. I waited for her to begin, but she simply watched me, while rain beat against the windows like grains of sand.

"I have had a trying afternoon, Louisa. I know you've come to reason me into accepting your husband's apology, but don't bother. I'm not yet ready."

"He wants to see you."

"The hell he does," I said.

"He wants everything the way it was before. He's told me."

Something tightened in my chest. "Well, it cannot be. I've lost my trust in him and he in me. We will never look at each other the same way again."

"You agreed to at least make a pretense."

"I agreed to too damn many things. Look at me, Louisa. My career was the only thing in my life I had done right, and now I do not even have that."

"He wants to help."

My jaw hardened. Brandon had offered his charity a few times since we'd returned to London, but the look on his face when he'd done so had enraged me further. "I'll not take help from your husband."

"You loved him once," Louisa said.

A piece of coal broke and slithered to the hearth. "I have changed. And he has done things that are unforgivable. You know that."