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Her mother drew in a deep breath. “He… forced me, Marcia.”

She sat there, motionless, with that admission ringing in the silence, scarcely daring to breathe or move out of fear that if she did she’d splinter into a thousand tiny fragments of absolute nothingness.

“What?” she whispered, despite knowing how very wrong it was to ask that one word, to expect her mother to repeat something so ugly, something that, by her pale features and haunted eyes, had clearly ravaged her to speak aloud.

“I—”

“Nnnnn.” Marcia cut her mother off with that unintelligible utterance, the only approximation of a word she could manage in that moment. She surged to her feet and pressed her fingertips hard against her temple to blot out the words that now sat there. But no matter how firmly she dug and how much she rubbed, they remained.

Her breath came low and shallow, or was that her mother’s? Perhaps it was her father’s? Or mayhap, it belonged to all three of them.

“I was alone,” her mother said, recounting the story of her conception. Rather, the true story of it. “Outside in the gardens during a ball. I had been… planning to meet your father.” She paused, her features stricken. “That is, I was planning to meet Marcus when Lord Atbrooke came upon me. After… that night, I fled back home to Grandfather. I told him everything. He supported me and crafted a story to explain my having a fatherless child.”

Those last parts of the telling came with such ease that she might as well have been recounting a remembrance from a long-ago picnic.

Had Marcia really wanted the truth? Had she really insisted her parents provide her with those details? Now, she regretted it with every fiber of her being.

She’d imagined there could be nothing worse than discovering that her life as the daughter of a young widow and a war hero had been as false as the fairy tales her mother had once read to her.

She’d been wrong.

This.

This was so much worse.

A humming filled her ears.

“No,” she whispered, scrabbling at her throat before she realized what she was doing. Marcia forced her hands back to her lap.

Her real father had been no hero but, rather, a fiend who’d… raped her mother, gotten her with child.

Oh, God.

Her entire life had been conceived from ugliness.

She froze as something else her mother had revealed this day hit her.

The night she’d been attacked so viciously, she’d been intending to meet Lord Wessex, the man whom her mother had truly loved.

Instead, she’d found herself raped and carrying the child of a man she loathed.And now they have you present every day as a reminder of what Mother suffered and what they lost together.

Hugging her arms close, Marcia hunched over, desperately seeking to escape the pain and misery cleaving her from the inside out.

“Do not do that,” her mother ordered, her voice raspy and harsh, and she stormed over with an angry rustle of skirts. She took Marcia firmly by the shoulders and gripped hard. “I love you.”

“We love you,” her father said quietly as he came to his feet and moved just close enough to stand at his wife’s shoulder, but far enough away to not intrude on the moment between mother and daughter.

“I know,” she said.

But how could she know that for sure now?

How could she be sure of anything?

How could her mother’s love even be true? How, when she was the daughter of a man who’d raped her?

“That was the single worst day of my life, Marcia,” her mother said, her voice catching, her eyes, so like Marcia’s, reflecting the pain of remembrance. “But from something horrible came something… camesomeoneso wonderful. It brought me you, and you gave me life, and you made me whole.”

Tears filled Marcia’s eyes, and she bit her lower lip.