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Mother stood near the head of the table, hands clasped, chin high. Her gown was one of her London best; her hair had been arranged with military precision. Opposite her, hat in hand, stood a man in a good, somewhat worn coat, his dark hair combed more neatly than the last time Pepper had seen him.

“Papa?” she whispered.

He turned at once.

“Ma chère fille,” Papa said, and in two strides he was at her side, taking her hand in both of his, pressing a kiss to her forehead that smelled of sugar and familiar warmth.

For a moment the room went very far away. Pepper had never seen them in the same air before, her parents. They were halves of a story that had always been told to her in different rooms.

“How—” she began. The question came out on a breath. “How is this…possible?”

“It is possible,” Mother said, in a voice that sounded as if it had been polished for the occasion, “because of you, darling girl. You and your very inconvenient clarity.”

Aunt Florence made an odd sound and sat down abruptly on the nearest chair. Mrs. Hart leaned against the mantel as if the marble needed her support.

Papa squeezed Pepper’s hands once more, then let one go to reach for Mother’s. Lady Erica did not hesitate; she put her fingers in his as if she’d been practicing it all along. They drew Pepper toward the table and nudged her gently into a chair between them, as if this seating had been planned for years.

“I imagined this differently,” Pepper said faintly. “When you two…reunited.”

Mother and Papa exchanged a look over her head. He scratched his mustache; she pursed her lips in that way that usually meant she was about to scold a duke.

“This is not the first time we have reunited,” Mother said.

Pepper’s breath snagged. For years there had been…oddness. Questions Mother had not quite answered about why she never crossed a certain part of Marylebone. The way her gaze drifted when Pepper mentioned Harley Street, going distant and soft as if remembering some other street entirely. Those silences at breakfast when the post arrived and Mother’s hand hovered over one particular letter a heartbeat too long. Pepper had always told herself it was a broken heart and old memories. She had never once let herself imagine it was a secret affair with…Papa.

Aunt Florence gasped. “What do you mean, ‘not the first’?” she demanded. “How long—”

“How long,” Mother cut in crisply, “do you imagine one can promenade one’s daughter to Harley Street every afternoon without my noticing, hmm?”

Pepper thought back, counting: the carefully chosen routes, the days when Mother had been suddenly “too tired for the park” and suggested Harley Street instead, the evenings when she’d found Mother staring into the fire with the faintest trace of flour on her sleeve and had assumed it was imagination. Perhaps it had never been.

“A year? Two?” Mrs. Hart muttered. “I expected about nineteen and a half, but I seem to stand corrected.”

“Eighteen months,” Papa said. “Then I came to England.”

Pepper stared at all three of them. “Everyone knew,” she said, “except me?”

“Not me,” Mrs. Hart fanned herself with her bare hand.

“Me neither,” Aunt Florence said stoutly. “I only suspected. Though the rain did seem to fall very conveniently whenever Pepper appeared at my door instead of taking her walk.”

“So you two…?” Pepper managed, looking from one to the other. “Since I was one and a half years old?”

Mother wagged a finger. “Only on rainy days, darling. When we knew you were safe with Florence and the weather would excuse red eyes.”

Papa’s mouth curved. “London has very obliging rain.”

Aunt Florence flung her hands up. “All these years,” she cried, “stealing afternoons like characters in a dreadful novel, and you did not think to mention it?”

“Because,” Papa said, eyes going soft and serious at once, “it would not have been prudent for Pepper’s chances. I did not want my daughter to suffer the same fate as my wife because of me.”

“So you hid,” Pepper said slowly. “From Society. From each other. From me?”

Mother’s shoulders dropped a fraction. Some of the strength was left in her jaw. “By the time your grandparents both had died,” she said, more quietly than Pepper had ever heard her, “you were fourteen. It was shortly before your debut and a few years after your illness. The world had already decided you were…fragile. It was hard enough to convince them you were eligible without also presenting them with a baker husband they had forbidden and a child they considered half-scandal.”

“I would not have let them hurt your prospects,” Papa said. “So we met when we could. When it rained. When you were…busy being a lady, ma petite.”

Pepper’s chest hurt. “And now?” she asked. “What is different?”