Slowly, very slowly, Cora padded quietly back into her mother's bedroom, closing the door softly behind her. The flickering firelight fluttered around her bare feet on the floor and, despite the room's warmth, her skin prickled from the coolness of the winter night.

She'd bathed. Though shiva did not end until tomorrow morning, though the rest of her father's family would not have their proper baths until tomorrow. Cora had bathed. She'd freed herself of her corset, she'd freed herself of her stockings, she'd torn away the heavy black layers of fabric and exchanged them for the light silk of her ivory chemise. Shiva or not, she had bathed, and her body felt infinitely lighter. But her heart did not.

She'd spent the entirety of the day in silence. Utter and complete silence. She'd not known what to do. What should she have done after that, after Robert's...well, what was it? An outburst? An admission? A release? Cora lingered on that word, release. It had been a release, hadn't it? A release. A release of everything that he was feeling that Cora had been too blind to see. She'd been too grieved to see. She'd been too caught up in her own mind, her own heart, to truly see his.

With a faint sinking, Cora realized that it'd not been the first time she'd done this. He'd not been the first person she'd failed to see. He'd not been the first person she'd neglected to truly understand due to her own uncertainty. She'd also done it with him - her father. And now, he was gone, and it was too late to make amends.

Standing in the center of the room, Cora felt as the house felt - dark and silent. She knew that Martha slept, what seemed, soundly in her large downy bed. She knew that all of her other relations slept, too, most in the clothes they still wore from the funeral, dirty and uncomfortable all to pay their respects. But in spite of slumber all around her, in spite of the thick quiet of night, Cora was suddenly awake. She was suddenly aware. She was suddenly conscious of the words she'd said to him...to Robert...and the words he'd, in turn, said to her.

He loved her. Robert had said that he loved her. In all of his anger, in all of the truth that he had poured before her...between them...he had said that he loved her.

And Cora believed him.

Taking in breaths, staring out onto some unseen shape in her mother's room, the fireplace crackling beside her, Cora thought of him. She felt for him. He had come all this way for her. He'd borne so much suffering, so much more suffering than she'd ever imagined.

How long, she wondered darkly, how long had he known? How long had he known that they'd lose their chance, their pregnancy, the baby they'd named and spoken to? How long had he feigned joy, just to keep her from worrying? How long had he hoped that his efforts to protect her...to protect their child...would not be in vain?

Cora heard her words from weeks and weeks ago at a distance, seeing them as if a third-party may see them, seeing them as if a more rational version of herself had stepped back into time and watched her carefully.

You can't forbid me, Robert. As much as you may try, you can't forbid me from going home.

Robert, don't be silly. People travel while pregnant all the time, and nothing ever happens.

What are you so afraid of, Robert? That I'll go home to see my father and not come back to you?

Another Cora, a more understanding Cora, watched as Robert held her as she cried, as he held her hand as the doctor tried to explain again how to best heal: Adequate sleep. Fortifying meals. Limited physical activity for at least four weeks.

There'll be other chances, my darling. There'll be other pregnancies.

But Cora had only shaken her head. It had taken a year, nearly a year, for this one.

She was now a Cora that was less blinded by grief, a Cora that now saw with a clarity that almost frightened her, what Robert had done. What Robert had meant. What Robert, her husband, had felt. And what...so very painfully obvious...what he felt for her.

Casting a languid gaze over her slumbering mother, Cora decided. Turning away, not bothering to dress in her dressing gown nor her slippers, Cora slipped from the warmth of her mother's room and out into the dark chill of the deep green hall. Taking the barefooted paces she'd taken a hundred times before, she moved toward the last door of the hallway. She moved toward the door she'd know apart from any other door, the door she'd pushed open again and again, though somehow tonight, it felt different behind her fingertips.

Quietly turning the knob, she pushed her way slowly into the pink of the bedroom, the fire in the hearth at the corner of the room tossing flickers of golden light around the paintings she had memorized every stroke of. She closed the door after her, and the latch clicked.

Robert sat up instantaneously in the bed. "Cora?" he called out, squinting.

Her head felt too heavy, and yet too light. Her chest heaved beneath her thin gown. Her jaw moved inside her mouth, her fingers tingled by her sides.

"Cora." Robert sat up further in the dark rose-colored blankets, adjusting himself to see her better. Cora could see he had changed, too, his soft blue pajama shirt pulling at the way his arm held his weight. "What are you doing? Where is your housecoat?"

She barely managed to open and close her mouth. Her thoughts were too hurried. How would she say it? How could she say it?

His brows dipped above his narrowed eyes. "Really, Cora. Is everything all right?"

"Do you?"

He fell silent at her voice.

She gathered, from somewhere deep within her, a will to speak again.

"You...you do, don't you, Robert? You...you love me."

It was quiet again, but only for a moment's time. Robert spoke, everything suddenly very still around them.

"Of course I do." Cora stared at him, his eyes holding onto hers. "I do."

Swallowing, Cora felt herself being drawn to him, as if some invisible force were pulling her, tugging her closer and closer to him. To where he was. Sitting upright in her bed.

She could feel his eyes on her as she drew nearer, encouraging her, but also wide in slight bewilderment; but his confusion did nothing to abate the strength at which she felt this compulsion.

Running her hands over his chest, she steadied herself as she pulled herself effortlessly astride of him, and without hesitation, as if it were all part of some fluid dance, some orchestrated ballet, she pressed her mouth to his, and she kissed him. Slowly, at first, and then at the sensation of the warmth of his lips, with a small insistence. Her hands went to his cheeks, the rough of them scratching her soft palms.

"We mustn't," he carefully warned against her, their noses a hairsbreadth apart, her dress pooling around her hips as she sat across his lap.

But she only shook her head slightly, kissing him again. She kissed him, feeling him, rocking her pelvis more closely toward him.

"You're certain?" he managed against her mouth and by way of answer, she silenced him, pushing herself flush against him.

His hands went to her hips, pulling them nearer, and Cora could feel the heat of his grasp through the bunches of her silk dress. She allowed herself to feel, to really feel, what was happening, to taste his mouth, to smell his scent, to enjoy the rise of her flesh at the coarseness of his touch. His fingers working up her sides, beneath her gown, sent warm shivers through her and stirred a delicious heat deep within her, the heat she had learned to mean only one thing. She wanted him. But more than that, she loved him.

God, how she loved him.

And suddenly, the only impulse she felt was the need to satisfy him. The need to somehow move even closer to him, with him, until there was no space left between them. She couldn't bear the space between them. There was more warmth, there was more urgency - a yearning – and she could barely control the way she moved her hips above him. She moaned softly at the reaction it stirred beneath her, her heart flipping and spinning at the very thought. He wanted her. Her wanted her, and he loved her. He loved her as she loved him.

Her eyes, though closed, felt teary in a sweet, achingly sweet, way. His mouth was deliciously salty, his tongue rough, and yet smoothly moving along hers.

It'd never felt like this. She'd never felt like this. So open, so bare, so raw before him in such a way that she wanted him to have her. She wanted him to take her – the real her – the wordless, thoughtless her, and she wanted to have him.

His large hands ran over her skin, over her breasts, cupping her face, and then at last gripping her thighs. She pressed against him, hard, and wrapped an arm around his neck.

Gently, so very, very gently, he somehow turned her up and over, so she was flat against the bed, his body covering hers, his mouth still kissing hers lightly and then deeply, tasting and then devouring in no particular pattern, in no particular reason or rhythm, in only need.

Her legs grew cold as her dress was pushed higher, his hips still between her thighs, but she didn't care. She barely felt the cold, she only felt his flesh, his newly exposed flesh, velvety against her own. He kissed her more insistently, and she knew what was coming. She ached for it. She arched her back, though slowly, for it...and then it happened.

She opened her eyes at the sensation, at their union, and brought a hand to his face. His lovely, lovely face. She saw his eyes, she saw his mouth, she saw the heaviness of his brows...and she saw that her hand was trembling.

When, very slowly, he began to move above her again, he lowered his lips onto hers softly, and it was more than her heart could possibly take.

Silently, she cried. And for the first time in nearly two months, for the first time in nearly a year, her tears were not born of sadness.

She laid bare beside him in her bed, in her pink bed she'd slept in as a girl. The bed she'd been tucked in to by nannies and the bed she'd come running toward when the pains and struggles of adolescence became unbearable. Now, Cora mused, she'd made love in it. For the first time in her marriage, she had made love.

She tightened the grasp she held of her husband's hand, and he returned it.

They'd been awake for hours now, hours, talking. Well, Cora was talking. About everything. About their baby, about her fears, about her lingering insecurities. And slowly, but in a way that she knew it would, the conversation had come to him...to her father...and she let herself tell him, tell Robert, everything.

Every memory - every wonderful, terrible, inconsequential memory – that her tongue could find, she talked of. She talked, and talked, and talked, until at last...there weren't any left. And his name slowly vanished from the air, and just like that, he was gone.

Cora's chest felt cold. He was gone.

After silence, after so much poignant silence, it was Robert who talked next.

"He spoke to me...on our wedding day."

Cora, her eyes trained up and on the canopy of her bed, swallowed. She listened.

"He said, he'd never forgive me for many things, for...the things that I and that we...we had done. But, but should I make her happy - should I make you happy - I would know what it was to be wealthy." She felt him move his hand around hers, grasping tighter still. "I wasn't certain at the time of what he meant. Ashamedly, I thought perhaps some sort of incentive, some sort of monetary reward in exchange for your happiness, but no. No. Soon I realized...I realized he meant you. You..." Her hand was pulled up and over toward Robert, and she looked to him, watching him as she melted at the warmth of his lips on the back of her hand. She let loose a shaky breath. "You, my darling. Thank God for you."