“Why on earth would I want to be inconvenienced?”
“You wouldn’t. I know that well enough,” she said scathingly. “You’ve made it abundantly clear. You wanted a wife, but only in name. You never cared about having a true marriage. That’s not something you want. That’s something that would be an inconvenience to you, and you’re not going to put up with it.” She laughed. “Although I must say, you’re reversing your position on all kinds of things today, not just the idea that I should be free to do whatever I want to do.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“You said that you would never join me in my bedroom.”
The comment caught him off guard. He stood staring at her for a moment. She kept her gaze on his face, not breaking eye contact, clearly unintimidated by the weight of what she had just said to him.
“Is that what this is about?” he asked. “Did you do this to try to take revenge on me?”
Now their eye contact broke.
“I don’t need revenge on you,” she said. “You’ve done nothing to hurt me.”
But there was pain in her voice, and suddenly, Edward found himself wondering whether, in fact, hehadhurt her.
“You can’t spend money so recklessly,” he protested.
“I don’t see why not,” Lydia countered. “You spend every hour of every day at work, so what’s the harm in it? It’s not as if you don’t have the money. Working as much as you do, you have plenty, and you and I both know that the reason your business ventures are as successful as they are is that you have me to point to. Ishouldbe able to take a free hand when it comes to making purchases.”
“Well, the orangery was too much. Perhaps we should make a rule that you have to get my approval for larger purchases.”
“Ridiculous,” she scoffed. “I couldn’t so much as get a good morning from you all week, and now, you want me to get your approval? I’ll never be able to do anything if I am to wait for your permission first. It’ll be impossible.”
“What do you want from me, Lydia?” he demanded. “There must be something you and I can agree upon in this because it just won’t do for you to go on spending money as you have been. I’ll be bankrupt if you do that.”
“Well, I don’t believe you will,” she said. “I believe your finances are in perfect order, and this is about controlling me, not stopping my spending. But if that’s what you want, it’s possible. You’ll just have to arrange to spend more time with me so that we can actually talk.”
“We should schedule business meetings?” he asked. “Perhaps once a week?”
“For heaven’s sake, no. Of course not. I’m not going to schedule a business meeting with my own husband.” She laughed. “I know you don’t want to have a real marriage, Edward, and I’m going to have to accept that. But couldn’t we at least be friends?”
“Friends?” he repeated. “What would that look like?”
“It would look like not avoiding one another all the time,” she suggested. “Having meals together. Perhaps going so far as to actually get to know one another. Come, Edward, you must have had a friend before in your life. You know what it means to be a friend.”
He hesitated. She was mocking him, he thought, but he wasn’t sure exactly what the joke was, so he wasn’t sure how to respond. In the end he decided to say nothing about it at all.
“You want to be my friend?” he asked. “Why would you want such a thing?”
“Because I’m alone all the time,” she explained simply. “And it’s not what I thought marriage was going to be like. I thought I would be gaining companionship. Well, I understand that you don’t really want a wife, and I can’t be angry with you about that. You have to pursue the life you want, though I do wish I had known going in what this was going to be like.”
“You wouldn’t have wanted to do it if you had known,” he said. “Is that true?”
“I don’t know what I would have wanted,” she admitted. “I don’t know what I would have done. But I wish I hadn’t entered into this marriage with so much hope. That’s the worst part—losing the hope I had for a future in which I might be able to fall in love. I’m not one to sit around feeling sad about the things I can’t have. If this is what my life is going to be, then the best thing I can do is to embrace that fact. But I see no reason you and I can’t at least be friends. So, yes, Edward, I do want that.”
“What do you want, specifically?” he asked her. “When you say you want me to be your friend, what do you actually want me to do? How do you intend to build this friendship?”
She looked confused for a moment, and he thought he had her—she clearly hadn’t thought this all the way through, and she had no idea what she was asking for.
Then, her expression cleared. “Meals,” she decided.
“Meals?”
“Breakfast and dinner. It’ll be no great hardship because we both eat breakfast and dinner every day as it is. We might as well do it together. We can use that time to get to know one another and to find out what we have in common. We can build a real friendship that way.”
“This is what you want?” he asked. “You want to have breakfast with me.”
