“I’m afraid that he doesn’t love me enough, Sophie. He doesn’t trust me, and now he never will,” Charlotte said chokingly. “And I love him so much! I don’t think that I can live without him.”

“Hush,” Sophie said, “hush. You don’t have to live without him. I think you are exaggerating the importance of Alex’s absence. I expect he is sitting in an Italian taverna at this very moment, having the time of his life, and hasn’t heard a thing about the Tatler article.”

“But how can he have such a good time?” Charlotte sobbed. “I miss him so much; I dream about him every night. It hurts!”

“Men are different,” Sophie retorted. “You can see that easily enough, Charlotte. Women may love one man, but men simply love the person they see before them. That old chestnut, absence makes the heart grow fonder, doesn’t work for men. They are like children with toys: They move on to the next shiny object if you take the old one out of their hands.”

Charlotte pulled herself upright. “You’re so bitter, Sophie,” she said. “Why are you so bitter?”

“My father,” Sophie replied succinctly.

“Oh,” Charlotte said unhappily. Everything in her resisted the idea that Alex, her dear beloved Alex, was like Sophie’s father, the Marquis of Brandenburg. But if Alex wasn’t akin to the marquis, where was he? Four, almost five, months had passed, and while she counted each day off as if it were a year, Alex was apparently frolicking about Italy, perhaps not even thinking about the wife he had left at home.

When Charlotte tried to imagine how he was feeling about her, all she could think of was his black rage in Depford, when he thought she’d betrayed him. She pushed the terrifying image from her mind. He promised, he promised to trust her. She simply had to hope that he would keep that promise. But her mind circled endlessly, moving unhappily from the facts of Alex’s first marriage, which made him so apt not to trust her, to their blissfully happy time together. Surely that would count with him, more than any silly article published in his absence!

“He said he loved being married to me,” she told Sophie, her voice shaky. “And he said he wanted to have children. I’m sure he’ll be happy when …” Her voice trailed off.

In Sophie’s warm hug she read disbelief; in the recesses of her heart the same disbelief hovered. If Alex loved her, truly loved her, he would have found a way to come home by now. She drew a deep breath and hoisted herself from the couch.

“Prospective mothers need to sleep.” Sophie held out her hand, her blue eyes loving, coaxing, sympathetic.

Charlotte smiled, a little, peaked smile. “Do you think … could you stay with me for another month, Sophie?”