"I don't think that's the most usual way for girls to end up in nunneries. You were told you were being rude, now stop it."

Rebecca squirms uncomfortably.

When his brothers are shooed he hugs her. "I'm sorry."

"It's not even that I don't have a perfectly good answer, I just don't have one where the story explains Catherine being yours."

"- real explanation doesn't work, except implying it was me? Not that I want you to feel like you have to lie to them - or answer them at all, it's none of their business -"

"No see, if we were telling them I'd say - it was very silly of me, I had clear instructions that the responsible thing was not to get anywhere near the point at which one might fall pregnant and I thought I was being very clever getting close without meaning to get too close but the boy thought I was being very naive and I was wrong and he was right -"

"I don't particularly care to have my name near that, no. - you thought he'd stop?"

"Well, he said he would, but I oughtn't have even got to the point of asking, it's like walking on a bridge with a huge hole in the middle and trying to edge around it when you don't even really need to be on the other side of the river."

"If he were a wizard I'd kill him."

She blinks.

" - in a duel, I mean, not at random, wouldn't abandon you and Catherine."

"I'm just not quite - I mean, my father said he wanted to kill him too, but he didn't mean it, it was obviously my own fault -"

" - at the winter ball his last year at Hogwarts Timothy's date got terribly drunk and threw herself at him and said he could do whatever he wanted and so he got her a glass of water and walked her back to her dorm and wished her goodnight, because she would've regretted it in the morning. She did something - ill-advised, but he would have been doing something wrong, if he'd taken her up on it, and that's even though he'd have married her afterwards -"

"Oh, I never for a moment imagined he'd marry me under any circumstances."

"That's not - where I was going with that."

"I'm not saying the boy's a saint, I was just very stupid."

"It's probably a bad idea to chance something as big as your future on other people being decent or honorable but that doesn't make forcing someone any less reprehensible -"

"But he didn't have to force me most of the way there, you see, it was predictable -"

"- yeah, it was predictable that if he was a bad person then under those circumstances he would do a bad thing for which he is not less accountable because anyone who knew he was a bad person could have seen it coming -"

"He wouldn't've done it if I hadn't let him though."

"I've been with girls who just wanted to have a little bit of fun and not do anything that'd ruin their futures, and if I'd ignored them when they said to stop that would be my fault, because they decided to trust me and I decided not to betray that trust and if I had the fault would be the betrayal, not the trusting in the first place -"

Rebecca sighs. "Well, I somehow managed to get married anyway and you're lovely, so my future wasn't ruined, I guess."

"Yeah." Squeeze. 

Snuggle, kiss.

"You know you can tell me to stop, right? And I will, always."