By the third morning, he had made a decision that surprised no one more than himself: he would speak to Cordelia Vane honestly once before the wedding proceeded any further, and he would ask her plainly, the way the stranger in the rain had asked him, what she truly wanted.
He found her in her family's drawing room arranging flowers with the brisk efficiency of a woman completing a chore rather than enjoying a pleasure. And when he asked if he might speak with her privately, she gave him a look of faint surprise, as though the request itself were an oddity.
"Of course, Your Grace," she said, and the title landed strangely on him now after a carriage ride where a stranger had simply called him Julian.
He did not waste time on preamble. "Lady Cordelia, I would like to ask you something, and I would like you to answer honestly, whatever the cost to either of our families' expectations."
Something flickered across her face: weariness, and beneath it, he thought, something like relief. "Go on."
"Do you want this marriage?"
The silence that followed was longer than he expected. Cordelia set down the flowers she'd been arranging, and when she looked up at him, her composure had cracked just slightly at the edges—enough that he could see, for the first time in their brief and formal acquaintance, an actual person beneath the careful poise.
"No," she said quietly, as though she had been waiting a very long time for someone to ask so she could finally say it. "I don't. There is someone else, Your Grace. There has been for two years. My father won't hear of it. He's a second son with no fortune to speak of, and when your family's offer came, mine simply accepted on my behalf. I have said nothing because I did not think anyone particularly cared what I wanted, least of all you."
"I didn't ask," Julian admitted. "I should have long before now. I'm asking now because someone recently reminded me that not asking is its own kind of cruelty, even when it isn't meant as one."
Cordelia's eyes were bright with something that might have been tears or might simply have been the sudden, dizzying relief of eleven days' worth of dread lifting off her shoulders all at once. "What happens now?"
"Now," Julian said, "I go and have a considerably more difficult conversation with both our families than the one I just had with you. But I imagine it will be easier than either of us spending the rest of our lives pretending to be happy in a marriage neither of us wants."