"And what good would that have done?" Percy fired back, "You know full well that my family didn't have the types of connections your parents wanted." Percy glared at her. Not to mention that he only had a suspicion of her feelings for him, nor the fact that he had wanted her to find a better life if that was what she wanted. So when she'd found one.... he had thought she'd be happy with that choice, not beholden to an old friend from school.

It hurt to hear that she had waited, that his suspicions - the ones he'd spent more than ten years to forget - might actually have been true. That he ought to have fought for her. That it was his own insistence that she might find something better and what that instead that doomed them.