Page 195 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 1-4
He doesn’t answer immediately. It looks like he’s in another time. Another place. Like he’s searching for something. For answers, or a memory. “I thought I did,” he says. “At the time. She was beautiful, and she was…” He looks as if he’s weighing the words in his mouth. “She was my first woman. You do feel quite like you are in love after your first time when you’re so young.” He looks at me with no small amount of irony, and I want to slide under the table. I don’t like how clearly he sees me. I also don’t like how clearly I’m able to see him. And I feel…jealous.
Yes. That’s what it is. Jealousy. Because at one time, there was a woman who had him, young and a little bit less hard, maybe. A version of him who was discovering desire, rather than wielding it expertly as he does with me.
A woman who had that sort of giddy feeling with him that I do sometimes. A feeling that I’m certainly alone with.
“I’m surprised,” I say. “That there was no one before her.”
He brushes his knuckles down the scarred side of his face. “There were reasons I didn’t pursue sexual relationships. You know I was not well. Not just physically, but I had many concerns about the physical. When I knew I had to take a wife, I also knew I had to get over it.” He laughed. “I did. I thought… I rather thought we were something like happy. For a while. We didn’t need to talk about the past. I just tried to play the role of husband and she was my wife. She was very good. She…she liked people, more than I ever did.”
“But she wasn’t happy?”
He shakes his head. “No. Colette had quite a long struggle with depression. For most of her life, actually. Not just when she was married to me. But I… I didn’t know.” His gaze gets extremely distant. “When I found her body on the rocks below the tower window I was so sure someone had done it to her. That the palace had been breached again. That it was like when my parents and I were taken. I… Until I found her note. After that I began to learn more about her, the real her. All the things she wrote in her diaries but never told me. How sad she was, and had been for years, even back to her childhood. It overwhelmed her.”
“Lucian,” I say, my breath filled with my own grief. At the image of him finding his young wife. At this certainty that he’d felt that everything was all right, and then it wasn’t.
“That night in the garden, when I couldn’t find you, I was very worried that you might’ve harmed yourself. I have learned that I’m not good at identifying the signs of what someone else is actually feeling. I don’t want you to be sad, sparrow. I’m trying to make you happy.”
I blink, my eyes filling with tears. “Depression isn’t as easy as happy or sad. It actually has to do with how your brain functions. That’s not my area of study, but I’ve done quite a lot of reading about it. In many ways she might’ve been happy with you. As happy as she could’ve been. It’s only that her brain might also have been making things feel so heavy. Unbearable. You know, you can see it on a brain scan. The way that some people can’t produce serotonin and dopamine.”
“I know,” he says. “Still, I regret it all the same. All these years on.”
What a horrible thing that I feel jealousy still. Over the deep emotion this man must carry for her twenty years later. I see it on his face. The pain. The regret.
It’s ridiculous to be jealous. She’s gone, and his emotions are still there, and that seems fair. A tribute to her in some ways, since she’s not here anymore.
But I’m his wife, and I find that I feel tender over it.
“Why did you let people think…?”
“What am I going to say? In her culture what happened is seen as a disgrace. A weakness. We said that it was an accident, people didn’t believe it. In order to clarify it, we would have to tell the truth, and that would change her story, and her legacy. It didn’t seem fair. In many ways I felt like perhaps I did kill her. That life with me was the thing that made it too unbearable. I didn’t think so, I thought we had enough happiness, enough love that the difficulty wasn’t so terrible. I was wrong. If you think I’m difficult now, you should’ve seen me then.”
Perversely, I’m jealous of that too. I want to know him. The version of him then, the version of him now. Every version of him always.
“What about Andrea?”
He laughs. “Not dead.”
“What?”
Of all the revelations he might have given me, that wasn’t what I expected.
“Andrea is not dead. We married, and we never consummated the union. It became clear to me quite quickly that it wasn’t going to work.”
“Why?”
“She’s a lesbian.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Yes. Which she told me after we married, and also told me that she would try to lie back and think of England, so to speak. I told her I wasn’t interested in such a sacrifice. But there was no going back to her family—they would only have married her off to someone else. They never would have accepted her. They were…from another time. So we hatched a plan. We annulled the marriage in secret—the priest knows, it couldn’t be helped, but as we never consummated that was easy enough. I helped her fake her death, she ran off to be with her lover, who she is now married to. She’s living under a different name in America. Far away from her family. And far away from any prying eyes.”
“So you…you took the blame for that as well?”
“It became part of my legend, did it not? And as I said to you before, it felt somewhat fitting. And beneficial. At the time, it seemed like a decent idea. All these years on it is ill-fitting. But then…”
“You’re punishing yourself,” I say. “Letting people think all these things about you.”
“I don’t know that I’m punishing myself,” he says. “But I had no investment in my own reputation. Not when there are aspects of it I deserve.”
