Glimmer of Hope by Sarah M. Eden Page A

sorting it out.
    “How long has it been since you last saw her?” Hartley asked.
    He didn’t even have to think. “Three years and two months.”
    Surprise crossed Hartley’s face. “You haven’t seen her at all? Not even once?”
    Carter shook his head.
    “But you knew where she was?”
    “Of course I did.” Carter stood again and crossed to the mantel. “If Adèle had gone missing, wouldn’t you have made every effort to discover where she was?”
    “I would scour this entire earth if I had to.”
    Carter looked down into the crackling flames. “Yes, well. I tracked her to Devon, and she told me not to come.”
    Speaking the words out loud gave them such finality. He could still see in his mind with perfect clarity the letter he’d received from Father’s man-of-business: Lady Gibbons has sent word, through Mr. Benton’s estate manager, that she is in receipt of your letter of inquiry and does not wish to see you. She further insists that she does not believe these feelings will change and advises you to leave her to enjoy the life she prefers.
    The life she prefers. A life without me.
    “She told you not to come,” Hartley repeated Carter’s words. “And you . . . didn’t?”
    Carter pushed out a tense breath. “I wrote to her dozens of times after getting her request that I take myself off. My father was indulgent of me, never said a word about having to frank so many letters. And when I finally received an answer telling me she’d had enough, he didn’t say, ‘I told you so’ or call me foolish.” Carter remembered that moment well: the pain, the heartache. “He set a hand on my shoulder and told me how sorry he was. After a day or two, he gave me a few tasks to oversee, some party business.”
    “A distraction,” Hartley surmised.
    “Indeed. He saved my sanity.” Father had been beyond understanding, the greatest support Carter could have imagined.
    “All this time I’ve known you,” Hartley said, “you’ve never once told me how things really sat between the two of you. I, obviously, knew yours wasn’t a love match by any means, but I didn’t realize the animosity there.”
    Not a love match. The declaration pierced like a sword. Theirs had been a love match once upon a time. Father had warned him that love was not enough for a successful marriage, that it required more than just that. Until Miranda’s defection, he’d thought his father was wrong.
    “I was trying to make the best of a difficult situation,” Carter said. “There was nothing I could do if my wife inexplicably decided to hate me. But I didn’t have to advertise that to the entire world.”
    “I’m not ‘the entire world.’”
    Carter paced away from the fireplace. He didn’t quite know how to explain his reasons for hiding the difficulties between Miranda and him. He wasn’t even sure what those reasons were.
    “Plenty of men, quite a few I can think of off the top of my head, in fact, would have wasted no time decrying the ill turn their wives had paid them,” Hartley said. “Why didn’t you?”
    Carter stood with his back against the wall, looking out over the book room but not really seeing any of it. “I don’t know,” he muttered.
    “There has to be a reason,” Hartley insisted. “Were you ashamed?”
    He answered with another shrug. Ashamed? That wasn’t it.
    “Embarrassed?”
    “Perhaps a little.” There was something a bit humbling about being run out on.
    “Do you mind if I propose a theory?” Hartley asked.
    Carter’s gaze narrowed a touch. He wasn’t sure he wanted his personal life laid out for scrutiny. But he’d started the conversation. It seemed a little late for objections.
    Hartley apparently took his silence as agreement. “I would wager that, at least at first, you still cared for her too much to denounce her in front of everyone.”
    There was a ring of truth to that. Society would have wasted no time slaughtering Miranda’s reputation for turning her nose up at