“It wasn’t an insult, you know, when I called this wedding ordinary. There hasn’t been anything ordinary about my life since the day my grandmother called me in and told me my uncle couldn’t have children. You cannot make the same mistakes as everyone else. You’re special now.” She chuckled roughly. “It is a brutal thing, knowing that what makes you special to your family is your birth order. Georgina especially didn’t care for it, because it meant I was more and she was less, and that was unacceptable to her.”

Eleanor took a deep swig of her drink. “I’m sure you remember the story I told you about Georgina, falling in love with an unsuitable young man,” she said. “That story was not, in fact, about Georgina.”

“Oh,” I breathed.

“It was foolishness. I should have known better. If I’d kept to my place, and kept him to his, Robert wouldn’t have been mine, but…” Her gaze drifted out the front windows and onto the darkening street. Whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t the people out there. “At least he might have been alive,” she finished. “He died shortly thereafter, in a car accident. Henry was very kind to me then, at a time when kindness was in short supply. We would sit outside for hours. Sometimes, he would read to me. Sometimes we said nothing at all. But mostly, he made sure I wasn’t alone, and eventually I felt like I couldn’t ever be hurt again with him by my side. I needed him.” Her face hardened. “Then Georgina decided she did, too, and it ruined everything. As it may for you.”

I reached out and covered her hand with my own, and for a second, she let me.

“Heartbreak doesn’t heal without scar tissue. If it happens enough, you harden. To everything,” she said, signaling Hazel and pointing to her empty glass. “I don’t want that for those boys.”

“I think they’re both tougher than Georgina was,” I said. “Look at how Freddie—”

“I’m not talking about Georgina.” Eleanor sat back against the wall, eyes unusually bright. “What you couldn’t read in that letter, Rebecca, is that it worked. She made Henry love her back. And I had to live with it. I’m not only the Nicholas in this story. I’m also the Frederick.”

I didn’t know what to say. My stomach churned. “I’m so sorry, Eleanor.”

She blocked her mouth with her hand as if she were rubbing her cheek. “I have trusted you,” she said, “with my greatest pain. I trust again that you will lay it to rest now, where it belongs, along with Henry and Georgina themselves. Nobody but you and my mother knows, and it will stay that way.”

“I can’t keep this from Nick,” I told her. “It’s not possible.”