She stood at the top of the stairs in her nightdress, hair loose over her shoulders, and watched her stepmother's face perform an entire lifetime of calculation in the space of a single breath: outrage, then confusion, then a smile stretched so thin it looked ready to tear.
"Your Grace," her stepmother said, dipping into a curtsy so sudden it nearly toppled her. "What an honor. Forgive us. We weren't expecting—"
"I sent word three days ago." The Duke's voice didn't rise, but it filled the entryway the way cold air fills a room when a door is left open too long. "To a Lady Avalene Marchetti, care of this household. I've come because I received no reply, and I wish to know whether the invitation had gone astray."
Avalene's stepmother laughed, a brittle, performative sound. "Avalene? Your Grace, surely there's been some confusion. My daughters, Clarissa and Ophelia, would be delighted—"
"I was quite specific in my correspondence," the Duke said, and something in his tone made even the air in the hallway seem to still. "I do not confuse names."
It was then that he looked up past her stepmother's shoulder and found Avalene standing at the top of the stairs.
She would think later that she should have retreated, should have let the shadows swallow her the way they'd swallowed her for three years in this house, ever since her father's ship went down somewhere off the coast and her stepmother's warmth had curdled into something colder with each month that passed without a body to bury.
But she didn't move. She stood in her worn nightdress with her hair undone, and let the Duke of Ashcombe see her exactly as she was: no silk, no jewels, nothing borrowed for the occasion of being looked at.
"Lady Avalene," he said, and bowed his head slightly, as though she were standing before him in a ballroom rather than halfway up a servant's staircase in her own home. "Forgive the hour. I had hoped for a letter. I did not expect to have to come collect my answer in person."
Her stepmother's mouth opened and closed. "Your Grace, I assure you, there was some clerical—"
"There was no clerical error, Mrs. Marchetti." He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. "I watched the smoke rise from your chimney myself as my carriage came up the drive. Paper burns a particular color when it carries a wax seal. I've seen enough of my own correspondence burned by rivals to recognize it."