The Undoing of Daisy Edwards (A Time for Scandal) by Marguerite Kaye

me, looking beyond tomorrow. But it wasn’t just terror. I wanted it. I really wanted it.
    ‘So everything is still here. You could put it all back together,’ Daisy said.
    I was so busy with my thoughts, I didn’t notice that she’d started to do that thing she did when I first knew her—withdraw into herself. Look out from that beautiful face as if she didn’t own it. I didn’t notice. ‘That’s what Jeremy would do if he were here,’ I said, gazing out the window at what was left of the rose garden, which wasn’t much. ‘He loved this place. He came into the title very young. Harrington was his life.’
    ‘But he left it all the same.’
    ‘There was never any doubt that he would sign up. I told you…’
    ‘Yes, you did. King and country.’
    There was an edge to her tone that made me turn round then.
    ‘My sister would probably love this place. It’s perfect for one of those moving pictures where the heroine is captured by an evil brute.’
    ‘Poppy. I saw a poster for her latest the other day,’ I told her, trying to work out what was wrong. ‘I forgot to tell you. Daisy –’
    ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’
    ‘I think her sister is lovelier.’
    ‘No.’ She wrapped her arms around her chest. She wouldn’t meet my eye, but pretended an interest in a vulgar piece of verse someone had written on the wallpaper. ‘I have presence,’ she said. ‘Poppy’s the beauty.’
    ‘That, my love, we must disagree on.’
    She turned at that, and her face looked stricken. ‘Don’t call me that.’
    I could have retreated. I could have brushed it off, but I didn’t want to. ‘My love,’ I said again, and it felt so right, just saying it. ‘Daisy –’
    ‘No! I told you, I was perfectly clear about it. I told you it couldn’t—I couldn’t. I’ve done that. I won’t do it again. I can’t. I
told
you, Dominic.’
    She pushed me violently away, and before I could stop her she was out of the door, running.
    Daisy
    My love. My love
, he said. Can your heart really stop and then start again? Mine did. He hadn’t meant it, I tried to tell myself. He had, though. He’d been waiting for me to reply. Watching me. Seeing inside me, the way he always does. The way I’d got used to. Come to enjoy. Only now, I didn’t want it.
    I ran. Opening doors at random, running up one set of stairs, then up again, along galleries, into dark, dusty corridors. At the top, the very top, were the attics with the furniture, ghostly and sheeted. I stood panting, crying, fists clenched. I was furious, thinking back over all the moments when I could have walked away. Right back to that morning when I woke up in his bed. If only I’d left then. Or after the first time. Or after the next time. If I hadn’t gone to the airfield after that letter he sent me. If he hadn’t listened to me. If I hadn’t listened to him.
    You take a step along a path. You tell yourself it’s just a tiny step. You can always turn back. The view looks good from where you stand, so you take another step. The view looks even better, so you take another, and still you tell yourself you can go back any time. You don’t notice that you’ve stopped looking back. You pretend that the small things you pick up on the way don’t mean anything. You tell yourself that it’s the novelty of it that’s so appealing. You tell yourself that while it’s fun not to be walking the path alone, you’d be just as content to do so. You don’t notice how much each step changes you, because you don’t
want
to notice, because that would mean you’d have to do something about it, and you’re not ready to do that. To step off the path. To walk away. To break those insidious silky bonds that form, tie, pull you tighter together with each step.
    Standing shivering in the milky light filtering through the attic windows, I knew it was too late, though I was terrified, far too terrified to admit it. If I had just kept to my routine of acting and martinis and