When the carriage finally slowed outside the bakery on the corner, its windows dark for the night, she felt the stopping of it like a small loss.
"Well," she said, gathering her damp shawl. "Thank you, Julian, for the ride, and for not putting me out in the rain, and for the conversation. I think I needed it rather more than I realized."
"So did I," he said, and there was something in his voice that made her pause with her hand on the door.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I hope you find a way to be asked what you want more often, before eleven days becomes tomorrow."
She did not wait for his answer. She climbed down into the damp night, and the carriage pulled away. She stood on the corner for a long moment, watching its lamps recede into the dark, feeling strange, unsettled, and oddly, foolishly hopeful about a man whose surname she did not know and would, in all likelihood, never learn—wondering why a single rain-soaked carriage ride had left her feeling more truly seen than any conversation she could remember having in years.
She did not know, as she let herself in through her own front door and climbed the stairs to her room, that the carriage did not turn toward Bond Street at all, but sat for a long while at the end of Chandler's Row, its occupant staring out at nothing, turning her words over like a coin he could not stop touching.
Someone to say my name as though it were a fondness.
No one had asked him what he wanted in years. A stranger who had climbed into the wrong carriage in a rainstorm had asked him twice in twenty minutes, and he found he could not stop thinking about the answer.
The Duke of Ashwick did not sleep well that night, nor the next. He lay awake turning the stranger's words over in the dark—someone to say my name as though it were a fondness—and found that once spoken aloud, even to himself in an empty room, the sentiment could not be unspoken again. He had spent eleven days telling himself the wedding was simply a fact to be endured, the way one endures weather or illness: something to be gotten through rather than felt. And now, absurdly, a woman he would likely never see again had unraveled eleven days of careful resignation in the space of a single carriage ride.
He tried the following morning to return to the ordinary business of his life: correspondence to answer, an estate steward to meet with regarding a matter of tenant repairs, a fitting for the wedding clothes he found himself unable to look at directly. And he found he could attend to none of it properly, his mind circling back again and again to the question the stranger had asked him twice: "What do you want?"
He had given her an honest answer in the carriage, more honest than he'd given anyone in years, and having given it once, he discovered he could not simply set it aside and proceed as though the asking had never happened.