It was silly to sit here and spin stories to herself, Ellie mused.  Henry was no child she was going to pick up from school today. He was nothing near predictable as he was grown.  There had been many red flags to him that she had ignored as she had thought that her own health was going to continue to decline.  His inner thoughts were private only to him. In the moments where he had shared what was in his mind, his trauma around his parents relations.h.i.+p did often leak to their own relations.h.i.+p.  Ellie was no psychiatrist, but it did feel to her that these images that he often referred to where things that troubled him on a level beyond common divorce trauma. Maybe their good chemistry had tempered into that deep fear.  It was a stronger possibility than what she had considered before.

Her conclusions were solid to her, but of course there was no way that Rightley could know of this.  He was trying to edit back some of what he had said earlier. "I'm just trying to say that you should not give up.  Michael, your friends, the residents--we all know that Henry is a man who really cherishes and honors you as a proper husband should.  He's very qualified in terms of becoming a landowner and developer in addition to his t.i.tular duties. Although he's not born into it, he's n.o.ble in all but blood.  This is a man who truly loves his wife--we all swear it."

Oh dear, Ellie stumbled forwards as she felt the dam in her mind break.  She couldn't keep herself safe and lose herself in the same breath. It had come to the inevitable crossroad.  There was a part of her that wanted to nod along and quietly disappear in accordance with the note left by her husband.  But, she was not the kind of woman that did what she was told by men. She paved her own path without a guiding hand because for her there really had not been one constantly there.  She decided the path she would have to take was with a face-to-face confrontation where Henry would admit that it had all been a lie.

With her resolve back, Ellie stood and turned to the quivering manager.  "I need a flight booked to New York as soon as possible. It would be excellent if it was leaving just as I got to the airport as I'm going to pack light to get there as soon as possible."

"You cannot go alone mam, it will be dirty of you to go where a man will be with another." The manager looked horrified as he watched his lady move to the opposite room and open up her dresser with purpose.  "I always promised your father that I would make sure that you were never dishonored in the pursuit of a relations.h.i.+p.  I cannot fulfill this last promise if you go so far away."

Ellie swallowed as she wondered if Henry's relations.h.i.+p with Michael was this complicated. She really wanted to blow up or roll her eyes at this old fas.h.i.+on idea of honor and marriage.  It really was gone past where she should fire him. Ellie turned to him sternly. "I'll come home with signed divorced papers or my husband in hand and I can swear to you honestly that I know either he will never leave me or he will leave everything to me.  I'm not desperately hoping for reconciliation. This house won't survive without investments and I won't have gotten married all for his gain. He's going to concede something and I'm going to make sure it's substantial so the people here will stop gabbing about what's going on here.  For that negotiation, I'll just need a lawyer. Keep the house together here while I'm gone."

=//=

Henry was happy to be back in the middle of the bustle of his hometown.  New York City had never tasted so much like home. A solid flight with a full bed and enough wine to drown himself had really elevated his dismal mood.  Honestly, not by much but enough to make him feel closer to his past life. The whole airtime he had been touching his wedding ring and wondering whether he could take it off already or would he need to wait for the annulment to be finalized.  The other woman wearing it would soon be free of it too. There were many women who had already alerted him that he was missing in the city and were welcoming him to his usual haunts. It was deliciously inviting to think he had people he could turn to but it all strangely was unappetizing to think of the opposite s.e.x. 

Yes, he did have a beautiful dutiful wife he was clutching onto with only the threads of a relations.h.i.+p. But nothing could compare to the way Ellie could do everything better. That woman had coaxed such a strong response from him without the machinations of all the social climbers and greed he had come to know. She could snuff out all of his reservations with a soft look. She had made a place so deeply in his heart with patient persistence to build him up and even in return wanted to know her. He didn't understand how someone could do something so profound and not really have it feel like any progress was there. He had hoped always that she too had another man waiting for her in the wings once he disappeared which is why he had let their intimacy continue. But now he had gotten singed by such intensity. Henry knew he could not continue on with such an arrangement. Change was needed and that frightened him.