Her interrupting outburst made him feel truly chastised — more so than all of her earlier chiding had done. Ben couldn't have said what was different about this from anything else, but it put things in a different light, somehow. It wasn't that she had been a naive girl when they'd met, the way he'd always assumed she was. It was easy, looking back on their relationship, to blame her ideals, her expectations, and never examine how they had come to be there. But if what she'd just said was true then... this entire thing was his fault. Something that he'd done had set her up with those expectations, and then... well, no wonder she'd been angry when he'd disappointed them all. They were expectations built up around him, not just some childish dream that she'd tried to force him to fit into.

He stood for a moment, too startled by the revelation to know what to say. The anger that he'd felt a moment ago was gone, as though it had just deflated. It was replaced with a feeling of... he wasn't exactly sure. Guilt was definitely a part of it, because she was right — she should have just gone on and had the sort of life her parents had wanted for her, and he had ruined that. Part of it was failure, too — one more thing he had inadvertently ruined — and a bit of ... defeat, he supposed, though he couldn't explain why.

"Are you really getting married next year?" he asked quietly.