"I know you wouldn't really want me to. I won't."

"...not even if I ask?"

"If we talk about it while it's gone and decide then maybe but - not suddenly, while you're still believing the things it says."

"That makes more sense."

And they're married now and she can feel all of Annie in her head and it feels so... right.

"... it's really nice how you'll always do what's best for me." Lucette says, absolutely confident in this for the first time.

"I love you forever." Annie kisses her.

Lucette kisses back, hungrily.

"I know."

The suicide note is easy enough to write, and then they are off to America. The trip isn't very difficult for Lucette given her powers, but it's harder on her Annie. 

None of her powers work very well to counteract seasickness but she'll bear with it to get to a better place with her wife. Husband? Spouse.

Annie is awfully convenient like that.

They have enough money to buy a large place in the countryside, but Lucette can't stand to be away from the bustle of a city. She finds a smaller place in a part of the city with only the occasional street performer on their block, to accommodate her wife's sensitivities. 

Annie gets the hang of falling down the stairs when they're too loud and healing from there and waiting it out in the cellar where she can't hear. She can at least tell with her sense when they've quit playing.

Problem solving like that is an important skill now that they're in a new place.

Lucette's mother writes Lucette after a month, informing her that Sophie was inconsolable after losing her best friend and... well. Her body was recovered from the River Ouse two weeks after Lucette left.

Annie didn't particularly click with Sophie but she can do her best to comfort her Lucette about it.

....can't she at least pretend to have liked Sophie? She was Lucette's best friend.

"Of course I'm grateful to her for having been a good friend to you."

"My only friend, really."

...well, Annie's her wife, that's not the same thing. "I'm so sorry."

Sure, she is.

"Have you at least figured out an income for us. Or done anything else to actually help."

"I still haven't been able to to get the hospital to let me try anything."

"Can you not even convince them you're component enough to demonstrate on someone desperate?"

"I haven't yet, I'm sorry."

Lucette will have to work herself, at this rate.

She writes back to her mother.

Iphigene Lockworth is not able to reply to her mail at the moment, as her husband is reconsidering what privileges may have inspired her previous behavior.

... What happened to Iphigene's first husband.

Iphigene's previous purported marriage was annulled. The suicide of her empowered daughter Lucette made it quite obvious that the marriage was a sham to cover up the incestuous union of Iphigene and her own father. After all, commoners can't father empowered, and what other possible union would be so scandalous that it would be covered up by marrying the noble women involved to a commoner.

Left out of the letter, but made quite clear in the news that starts filtering in from the continent, is how strenuously the elder Lord Oakhill denies these allegations.