“Farnsworth’s death makes Tess a widow. She’s now free to marry you.” Hugh was silent for a moment. “I realize it’s probably an odd thing to say, but after all these years it feels almost…irrelevant. There was a time I was desperate to be able to marry Tess, to give her the protection of my name and ‘make an honest woman of her’ in the eyes of the world, as they say. But now…” He shrugged. “At this point we’ve been ‘living in sin’ for six years. I suppose if we’d had children it might be different, but that hasn’t happened. And after a while you begin to realize what’s important—that the real
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