"My cousin got engaged tonight," she offered instead into the quiet. "That's the dinner I ran from. Everyone toasting to a match that will make her family richer and her miserable, and nobody in that room willing to say the second half of that sentence out loud."
"You said it just now."
"I say a great many things I shouldn't." She smiled, small and rueful. "It's why I wasn't invited to give a toast."
That earned her something she hadn't expected: a short, surprised laugh, low and genuine, gone almost as soon as it arrived, as though he'd forgotten how the sound worked.
"I imagine you'd have been considerably more interesting than the toasts I've had to sit through this week."
"Low bar, I'd guess, given the company."
"Devastatingly low."
"May I ask you something in return?" Julian said after a pause. "You said your cousin's dinner was difficult to sit through. Was it only the toasts, or is there more to it than that?"
Marianne considered the question longer than she meant to, surprised that a stranger's asking felt easier to answer than her own family's asking ever had.
"My cousin Louisa and I grew up more like sisters than cousins," she said. "Our mothers were close, and we were raised in each other's pockets from the time we could walk. She used to say she wanted to marry for love or not marry at all. I heard her say it a hundred times as a girl, usually while we were meant to be doing needlework and doing anything but instead. And tonight, I watched her stand in front of forty people and smile through a toast to a man she's spoken to perhaps a dozen times, because his family's fortune will save her father's estate from ruin. And I kept waiting for someone, anyone, to ask her if this was truly what she wanted, and no one did—including me. I fled instead of asking. I'm not sure that's much better."
"It's considerably better than not asking and staying to watch anyway."