"No." The word came out clipped, almost surprised at itself, as though he hadn't meant to admit that either. "If anything, it's gotten considerably more complicated in the last ten minutes."
"I apologize for complicating your evening."
"Don't," he said it quickly, firmly, and then seemed to hear how strange that sounded and tried again, softer: "It's not your fault, and it isn't unwelcome, precisely. Just unexpected."
Marianne considered him for a long moment—this stranger with the tired eyes and the carefully controlled voice, sitting in a carriage that was too fine for a man merely running an errand, on an evening he had described as one he intended to make difficult for his family.
"You're getting married," she said.
It wasn't quite a guess. There was a particular species of misery she recognized, having watched her cousin wear it like a mask all through dinner that evening, and this man wore it, too, just better hidden.
Something in his face shifted—not surprise, exactly, more like the flinch of a man who has been struck somewhere he thought was armored. "In eleven days," he said. "To a woman I have spoken perhaps forty words to in my life, none of them particularly memorable."
"That's rather a lot to be getting married on."
"It's rather more than most men of my situation are afforded." His voice had gone flat, reciting something he had clearly told himself many times before, the way one repeats an excuse until it starts to sound like reason. "It secures an alliance my family requires. It settles a debt of obligation two generations old. It is, by every measure that matters to the people who arranged it, an excellent match."
"But not by the measures that matter to you."
He didn't answer that. He looked out the window instead at the rain sliding sideways across the glass, and Marianne understood that she had touched something he had not intended to let a stranger touch. She let the silence sit rather than pressing further, because she knew better than most what it was to have a feeling too large and too inconvenient to say aloud in polite company.