She said she'd feel better later, and Ford was so relieved and grateful he could have cried. It was a lie, obviously. He recognized her situation too well too have thought it anything else. Heartbroken, distraught, entirely overwhelmed — but with the grim recognition that things still needed to carry on regardless, and so some semblance of stability would have to be aped until it could be achieved. He'd done this. Dissolving the estate while he was still reeling from his discoveries after the death of his father. Planning the wedding while in the middle of a prolonged goodbye to Tycho that would never feel sufficient. He knew how difficult this was, but how necessary. He hadn't expected her to understand. It was the kind of thing he wouldn't have expected from Grace, or Clementine, in a position like this — but Jemima had never let him down, actually, since their initial agreement to make the best of things; she had always been everything he could have asked for in a wife, and always picked her part up without hesitation or protest, so maybe it was uncharitable for him to think she would have failed in this.

Her next statement caught him off guard, however. "Are you?" he asked before he could think better of it. Ford certainly was — sorry she had to live with knowledge she would never be comfortable with, and sorry she had found out that way, and sorry for each of the specific words Tycho had used, and sorry she couldn't have seen Ford at least resist the lure towards adultery a little more forcefully. But he had not expected her to be sorry about it, and it wasn't as though she had done anything wrong. This was her house, after all; she had a right to be in its hallways whatever time of day or night she chose. It was Ford's fault, in the end, for having opened the window.

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   Jemima Greengrass