One child out of wedlock is an error. Two suggests carelessness. Three—and six—is simply wrong. Wrong.

At least you pay for them.”

“I could support a foundling hospital, and you would applaud my virtue.”

“I didn’t expect you to populate your own orphanage,” she said.

Here, drink your liqueur," Henry said, tossing back her drink. "I carry it with me everywhere because it's the only kind of drink that Leo doesn't like, so there's a chance I'll still have some tomorrow.

She had always looked like some confectioner's fantasia, a wee thing created of spun sugar, gossamer light, pale and shimmering, so fragile she might melt away in the morning dew. The years had made her seem even more unearthly. Yet, she looked older, too, riper, no longer sprite but faerie queen ... Everything about her was brighter, clearer, lighter. Everything but her eyes. They had darkened into something more complicated, deeper, more intense and intoxicating: pansies in shadow, the Cretan sea at midnight.

She still remembered sitting for hours as a little girl and pretending to be a hassock. A foot stool. Because if she could just stay very small, and very quiet, her mother would forget she was there, and then she wouldn't scream about people and places and things that had gone wrong.

My only excuse is that I have no reputation myself, and I am thereby well aware of its ephemeral value. Reputation is worthless.

Sebastian Bonnington's love letter to Esme Rawlings