He shook his head. He had never, with all his mental preparation, come up with a good lie to tell Leesa. “Among other things, I’ve been thinking over what’s going to happen in my future.”

She smiled again and squeezed his fingers. “Silly. Your future is marrying me and living in a beautiful house and having marvelous daughters. They’ll have my face and your brains, and everyone will adore them.”

“I wish that were so,” he said seriously.

“Why wouldn’t it be? I know we’ve waited a while to marry, but we’re still young enough to have children. As many children as we want.”

Nolan sat up in his chair, and his strange detachment took this moment to fall away. Suddenly, everything seemed hyper-real—every distinct color in the room, every individual bone in the hand that held onto his, every breath he painfully drew into his lungs. “I don’t think so,” he said in a low, firm voice. “I don’t think that is the future I want after all.”

Leesa’s dark eyes grew darker, shadowed from within by sudden doubts. “Then—what is it you do want? You’ve never mentioned any other plans. And we’ve talked about this often enough.”

“Sometimes, I think you don’t realize how important my work is to me,” he said. “Sometimes I haven’t realized it myself. I can’t move back in-country with you to live on your grandmother’s estate. I can’t turn my back on the life I have so carefully fashioned for myself here. I can’t give up everything I’ve worked for to become your husband and the father of your children.”

“But—you never said—if it matters that much—well, we could find a way,” she said. Her face was both frightened and hopeful. She looked like a child trying to reason her way out of a nightmare. “Lots of families have homes in the city and homes in the country, and they move between them—if you only had to work four or six months a year—”

“It’s not just the work,” he said as gently as he could. “It’s the life. Nothing about it matters to me. All that talk of who marries whom—what heiress has received what property—it’s central to your existence, but I don’t care about it. I don’t like those people. I don’t want to be with those people.”

“You don’t want to be with me,” she whispered.