"I'm asking now."
"I want..." He stopped, started again. "I want someone to say my name the way you just said hers—'Cordelia'—as though it were a fact and not a fondness. I have never once heard her say mine with anything in it at all."
Marianne felt something in her chest go soft and aching at that, at the plainness of it, at the way he'd said it, like a confession he hadn't planned to make and couldn't quite believe he'd made anyway.
"That's not nothing to want," she said quietly. "That's rather the whole of it, I think."
"It's an inconvenient thing to want eleven days before a wedding."
"Inconvenient doesn't make it wrong."
He looked at her then with an expression she couldn't quite name: startled, and something gentler beneath the startlement, as if she had handed him back a piece of himself he'd misplaced without realizing it was gone.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. The rain had begun to ease, the drumming on the roof softening to a patter, and somewhere ahead of them, a wheel struck a pothole hard enough to rock the carriage sideways. Julian reached out instinctively to steady her, his hand closing briefly around her wrist before he seemed to remember himself and drew it back.
"I apologize," he said.
"Don't," she said, echoing his own word back to him, and something about it made him almost smile.
They rode the rest of the way to Chandler's Row talking of smaller, easier things: her father's failing eyesight and the way he still insisted on reading by candlelight against every physician's advice, the ridiculous hat her aunt had worn to the engagement dinner, the particular misery of sitting through a toast one didn't believe in. And Marianne found, with something like alarm, that she did not want the ride to end.