Tommy wasn’t a baron, and Philippa would be forbidden from marrying her even if she were. Tommy wasn’t even a man. And yet Philippa was strangely glad of it. She didn’t need Tommy to have male parts. She just wanted Tommy.

But there was no road forward. Only a brick wall and a forced detour in another direction.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Philippa said. “It was nothing.”

“It felt like something to me.” Tommy’s voice was soft.

“Philippa,” Mother shrilled. “Answer when you’re spoken to!”

“I have to go,” Philippa said, then called out, “Yes, Mother, I’m coming now.”

She forced herself to hurry away from Tommy, to stride past Elizabeth and Marjorie, to accept the picnic basket from her mother and pretend her interruption hadn’t been the absolute worst timing in the long and storied history of her mother’s unwanted interruptions.

Was this how her friend Gracie felt when she sneaked off for stolen kisses with the rake of the week? Until Tommy, Philippa hadn’t known she could feel this way.

She felt as though she’d been lied to her entire life. She’d missed out on so much. Philippa liked dancing with the right person, and kissing, and touching. She even liked banter and being giggly. It was fun and romantic.

The only way to make it through the rest of her life was to pretend this hadn’t happened. That she was still emotionless Philippa with the cold dead heart.

She hadn’t liked the rules she’d been born to follow, but she’d known how to navigate them. Mother had implied a nice library was the best a bluestocking could hope for.

Philippa’s acceptance of her staid life was predicated on that assumption. That there wasn’t something better, something different she could have. That “a nice library” was a fair trade for the autonomy of her body, a vessel for which she had little use anyway. Why not let some man climb atop her and then raise his children? It was how things were done. It was the way the world worked.

Except sometimes…it didn’t. Sometimes things turned out differently than expected. Sometimes there was a twist in Act Two that you never saw coming.

It would perhaps have been better never to realize that she could feel passion than to know she must spend the rest of her life without moments like these. That first garden, where Tommy had almost kissed her. This garden, where it had finally happened.

Now that she’d experienced passion, she wanted it.

And the world wasn’t built to let her have it.

She could not unlearn this new facet of herself, but she could refuse to indulge it. At least until she’d had time to give these new discoveries proper consideration. She could then decide what to do—or perhaps decide it was best not to change anything at all.