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This one hurt just as bad.

Only in different ways.

Because of the person responsible for this hurt. Because she’d trusted him. Because he’d been her friend and then her lover. And because she loved him.

She’d been hurt before.

But never, never had the hurt felt like this.

Her entire body ached.

So this was what true love felt like, like one was being shredded into a million broken pieces.

Curled on her side in the same bed that she’d known for the past ten years, Marcia stared at the beveled mirror across the room and her reflected visage. Her cheeks were swollen and red from all the tears she’d cried that afternoon.

When her life had fallen apart, Marcia had run to the home of her childhood, a place that represented safety and happiness.

Only, that illusion had been shattered weeks earlier, and she was now left with only reality.

She wanted to go back to safer times, when she was ignorant of her past and when Andrew had been her friend and not the man she loved beyond all reason. Because then she wouldn’t hurt like this. Because she would have laughed and rolled her eyes when she’d learned the truth and understood that there had been so very many women in his life, even the heinous one whom Marcia shared blood with. And then it wouldn’t hurt like she was being ripped slowly to pieces.

Biting her lower lip hard enough to taste the metallic tinge of blood, she welcomed the pain.

Her mother rubbed small circles over the small of her back.

“I’m miserable,” she whispered as her mother sat on the edge of the bed beside her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” her mother murmured.

Marcia hesitated, because saying yes would feel like a betrayal of the man she loved despite everything she’d discovered that night. Another fresh wave of tears filled her eyes, and she nodded.

Like she was the child of years ago when she’d suffered her first real loss with the passing of Aunt Dorothy’s pug, Marcia sat up and hurtled herself into her mother’s arms and just wept.

Her mother folded her close, and Marcia cried all the harder. It felt so very good to be held by her mother.

Only, her mother could not make this better.

As a grown woman who now knew the cruelties life was capable of, Marcia saw that no hug could erase a hurt like this. A hug could bring comfort and warmth, and that was enough. She took solace in that discovery.

When her tears trailed off to shuddery hiccoughs, Marcia rested her chin on her mother’s shoulder and took comfort in the small, soothing circles as her mother rubbed her back.

“You love him.”

“Beyond all reason,” she lamented.

“Alas, I fear that this is what true love is.” Marcia heard the smile in her mother’s voice. “When one is happy, there is no greater joy, and when knows hurt, it cuts sharper than a blade.”

Marcia bit her lower lip, torn between wanting to share all and none of it. Despite all that had transpired with Andrew, and this newfound discovery that she loved him, she knew how the world viewed him, and she wanted to protect him from further judgment, even from her family.

Especially from her family.

But this was her mother, the mother who’d given her life even when the decision had been forced upon her. She could have treated Marcia with disdain and hated her for what she represented, but she hadn’t. She’d loved her unconditionally and openly and had been only ever good to her.

So Marcia told her mother everything, beginning with the plan she’d cooked up and Andrew’s initial resistance. She shared her run-in with Lord Atbrooke and the threats he’d made, and how, after all that, Andrew had held her and kissed her and helped her to see beauty in herself despite the man who’d sired her.

A heavy silence followed.

“Charles was a terrible bounder,” her mother finally said, unexpectedly.