Eleanor Howard was a woman grown; she’d been married at twenty, that much was true, and her son had been born after more years than she’d wanted to remember—there’d been two failed pregnancies before Andrew had arrived safe and sound, if a little smaller and earlier than the doctors had been comfortable with. But she was certainly no blushing debutante. She’d woken up alone more often than she’d woken up with Charles; he had business trips and sometimes did not come home at night even when he was in the city. She’d found him on more than one occasion asleep at his desk, face down in piles of papers, pen dangling from his fingertips. On others, napping on the narrow sofa in his study, a bottle open and unfinished on the floor by his side.
And of course, these last few weeks, she’d been sle
