Andrew settled his arm around Astrid’s shoulders, a warm, welcome weight. “Gareth apologized to me. It about broke my heart. He said my brothers ought to have protected me.” Now he slugged back his drink, a gesture that struck Astrid as despairing.
“I’ve seen him looking at you lately with an odd expression on his face. Was this a recent discussion?”
“Shortly after the babies arrived,” Andrew replied. “I waited for Gareth to come down the stairs, knowing he’d have to get something to eat or drink eventually. When he found me, he was a man who believed his selfish rutting had cost his wife her life. I thought to comfort him by confessing to costing my own child—conceived with Gareth’s fiancée—his or her life. In hindsight, it was a deuced odd sort of comfort to offer, but under the circumstances, it made a kind of sense.”
Astrid was silent, feeling utterly weary. Andrew’s revelations explained a lot, but she wasn’t ready to believe their marital problems were solved.
She squirmed down to lay her head on his muscular thigh. “Something bothers me.”
His hand settled on her hair, the near reverence in that simple touch making Astrid’s heart beat harder. “Tell me, love.”
“You believed you were responsible for the death of an unborn child, but now you know there was no child. Morally, is that a material distinction to you?”
Andrew put his drink on the end table and let his hand drift from Astrid’s hair to her face. She had asked the ultimate difficult question, but she was also coming to know her husband, and the matter had to be faced:
How was Andrew to reconcile himself to the fact that he’d been willing to put the life of that unborn child second to his mother’s welfare, and in his own eyes, second to his own convenience? Had there been a child, the child would have died with Julia, and by virtue of Andrew’s choice.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I made a selfish mistake, the results of which are no more than I deserved for having slept with a woman who was, as far as I knew at the time, otherwise chaste. Had there been opportunity, I would likely have slept with her again at other times and places.”
Such remorse would have felled a lesser man, and yet, the conversation could not end with that guilt-wracked recitation. Astrid covered Andrew’s hand with her own, lest he try to extricate himself from the discussion.
“Let me put a question to you, then, Andrew,” she said. “Why do you define your entire self, your entire life, in terms of those mistaken moments?”
Andrew’s hand went slack in hers.
A silence grew, punctuated by only the crackling of the fire.
“Why do I…?” Andrew repeated slowly, stupidly, as if drunk.
“Why do you define yourself, your entire life and worth, in terms of the mistakes you made with Julia?”
“Because some mistakes are so great as to define one.”
Astrid sat up, hoisted herself off the couch, then turned and lowered herself to straddle his lap, her tummy bulging between them.
“You listen to me, Andrew Penwarren Alexander. You are a good man, an honorable man, and a loving man,” she pronounced slowly, as if he might have trouble comprehending her. “You faced a decision when you risked your life charging over here from Enfield. You could have let my sister quietly die, and her children with her, but you did not. You took a chance, you made an effort, and now Felicity, James, William, Pen, Joyce, and Gareth all have a chance to enjoy long, happy lives as a family.”
She framed his jaw in her hands. “Why don’t you allow those moments—those moments when your courage carried the day for all of us—to define you? Why don’t you allow the moments today when you again risked your life for me to define you? Why don’t you allow the moments years ago, when you also risked your life for me, to define you?”
She lowered her forehead to his and let her tears trickle onto his cheeks.
“I am not finished,” she admonished him, though where the fortitude to persevere would come from, she did not know.
She laid a hand over his heart, as if she’d prevent him from setting her aside and leaving the room, the property, her life.
“You were a friend to both Felicity and Gareth when they had no friend. You behaved honorably with respect to me when I was a girl, even if your notions of honor were misguided. You danced attendance on your mother when his blooming lordship, the marquess, couldn’t pause in his wenching long enough to notice she was lonely for her sons. You took yourself off to God knows where, Andrew, to try to protect the people who love you from yourself…”
She was crying openly now, but wasn’t sure all the tears on his cheeks were hers.