When she had gone in search of the ease that came with alcohol, in finding the perfect balance of sobriety to drunkenness that allowed her to forget her worries without seeing that she was foolish enough to be sick (or, as her thoughts supplied for her, falling asleep on a pile of hay with no thought of evening frost), she had remembered how it brought her emotions so close to the surface. There was no real stability to them in listening to the sound of Athos' voice and allowing herself to be soothed by its vowels and consonants.

His opinion of her was not one she took lightly, and while her worries over the state of her own soul were not entirely dissipated to hear it, she could not argue against something so wholly felt. She held him in too high an esteem for it.

Where she could not dredge up the worst of her worries, of how she held back from d'Artagnan the news of her widowhood in the uncertainty of whether she even wanted him to change (what was to her) the past before Athos had explained the impossibility of it, she sighed softly over her drink. "My husband was murdered, Athos," she told him, "He was murdered and it was my fault."