The Duchess Who Dined Alone [We Wore the Same Ring]

The candle burns low. I sit at the end of the dining table, silver polished, wine untouched, dinner going cold for the third night this week.

The chair across from me-his chair-remains empty.
It always is now.
They say he's in the city, whispering rebellions and kissing poetry from the mouth of a woman half my age. They say she wears my rubies now-the ones my mother gave me on my wedding night. I do not ask. I do not weep. I simply breathe.
That is all I am allowed to do these days.

Breathe... and stay married.

The walls of Alwyndale Manor are not kind to echoes. Every step I take, I hear only silence follow. Not even the portraits watch me anymore. Perhaps they've turned away out of pity.

I wonder if he thinks of me at all.

Sometimes, I pass him in the corridor. His eyes glance over me like I am a ghost that doesn't haunt properly-quiet, decorous, and easy to ignore.

I am not angry.
That is what makes it worse.
I am not angry, because there is nothing left in me that he hasn't already taken.
My ladies speak gently now, as if I might shatter. The servants smile too carefully. No one dares to say her name in front of me. But they all know. The whole court knows. The whole damn country knows-
The Duchess has been replaced.
Not by a divorce. Not by decree.
But by absence.
And that, I think, is the cruelest kind of affair-the one where the world still calls you wife, but no one treats you like one.
Not even him.

POV: Lady Seraphine, The Duchess