What She Finally Let Herself See

"There's a part of it I've never said aloud," Diane admitted, later that same evening, the fire burned down to embers now. "Not to you, not to anyone."

"You can say it now, if you want to."

"I knew Monsoreau's temper. I knew exactly what he was capable of, and I kept seeing Bussy anyway, in those last months, because I wanted the happiness more than I wanted the safety. That was a choice. I've spent years letting myself believe the whole tragedy simply happened to me, the way weather happens to a traveler caught in it. It didn't. I chose to keep walking into the storm, every single time."

Gertrude was quiet for a moment. "Does that make you responsible for what happened to him?"

"I've asked myself that more nights than you'd believe. I don't think the answer is yes, exactly — but I don't think it's entirely no, either. I made a choice, knowing the danger. Bussy made his own choices, being exactly as reckless as he always was. Monsoreau made the choice that actually killed him, and that choice was murder, whatever else either of us contributed to the circumstances that made it possible." Diane looked at her hands. "Three people's choices, all real, all mine or Bussy's or Monsoreau's to own. I've stopped trying to collapse that into one simple story where either I'm blameless or I'm the whole cause of it. Neither one was ever true."

"That sounds like a harder thing to carry than either simple version would be."

"It is. It's also the only version that's actually true, and I find I'd rather carry something true than something comfortable." Diane managed something close to a real smile, the first Gertrude had seen from her all evening. "I was a young woman in a marriage I never chose, married to a man whose jealousy had already taken most of what a marriage should give a person. Choosing Bussy, dangerous as it was, was choosing to want something for myself anyway. I don't regret the wanting, even now, even knowing what it eventually cost both of us."

"What do you think he actually left you? Besides the grief."

Diane considered this for a long moment before answering. "The knowledge that I was capable of choosing happiness even against real danger, and meaning it. That's not nothing, whatever it cost to learn." She stood, finally, signaling the anniversary's private hours were drawing to their end for another year. "It's not the inheritance I'd have picked, given any real choice in the matter. But it's mine, and I've stopped wishing it away simply because it came at such a price."