Isadora was quiet for a long time. The bread rose. The light faded. The house settled around them with the particular, groaning patience of an old building accommodating the weight of secrets it had been carrying for centuries.
"I slapped him," Isadora said at last.
"I heard."
"I slapped the Duke of Ravenshade across the face in his own garden, at his own soirée, in front of God and the moon and a dead pear tree, and he did not stop me. He did not grab my hand. He did not retaliate. He just — he stood there and he took it, and his face did that thing, that terrible, wretched, devastating thing where his eyes go soft and his jaw goes tight and he looks at you as though you have just broken something inside him that he did not know was still whole."
