A few more days passed in much the same way as the last several weeks—with her and Henry both pretending there wasn’t some enormous, invisible cloud hanging over them that would never go away until they talked about it. But neither of them brought it up. Amala prayed very hard to know what to do, what to say, how to say it, and when. She wondered if her prayers were being heard until a thought occurred to her that seemed to hold an answer, or perhaps the beginning of an answer. She recalled very clearly how it had been she who had once insisted they keep their relationship a secret, and it was she who had demanded that he not try to court her officially, and it was she who had insisted they could never be married. She had discussed these very things with her parents recently, wanting to understand what had happened and why, in ways she’d perhaps been unwilling to look at when it had occurred. But she’d not considered until now the real possibilities of how the impact on Henry of her refusing him then might be the very reason he was so unwilling to even talk to her about it now. Perhaps it needed to be up to her to open the conversation, even if she didn’t want to. She doubted that Henry was consciously thinking that it needed to be up to her, but perhaps something within him had good cause to not want to bring it up. Given her growing awareness of how her choices had affected everyone in the family—most especially Henry—she couldn’t blame him.

Amala went to the nursery for a while after breakfast as she often did, not surprised to find Henry on the floor, playing with his son. The nanny was in the next room with the door open, on hand in case she was needed.

“Good morning,” Amala said, and Henry returned the greeting. She sat in the rocking chair, as she usually did. Everything appeared to be normal, but inside she was trembling, struggling to gather enough courage to open up a real—and likely difficult—conversation with Henry as soon as the opportunity presented itself.