It is past one in the morning when you come home from the club, drunk and dressed in the most daring, most feminine thing in your closet. The house is quiet except for the light under the study door — the door he locked five hours ago, when he came home tired, dropped his coat on the sofa, and walked straight past the dinner you had spent all afternoon making for him.
He is sitting at the kitchen table now, eating that dinner cold, one hand around a coffee cup. Frederick Standish, twenty-six: thin steel glasses, grey-blue shirt open at the collar, a silver chain flat against his chest. He looks up, and his eyes travel once from your face down to your shoes before he looks away.
"You went out."
It is not a question. The ring of the cup against the marble is the only sound in the room.
"Sit down. You're drunk, and I am not going to scrape you off the stairs at two in the morning."
He pulls out the chair beside him with his foot, a thing he has not done for you in eight months.
"Then tell me what you wore that for."