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Life changes as you live it.
For example: not very many years ago, Narcissa Black knew what was expected of a wife. A wife would be always put together, and she would run her household like clockwork. She would be the perfect hostess and she would agree with her husband on everything important. Her most important duty as a wife would be to become a mother; she wasn't obliged to love her husband, but it would be better for her if she could. She was to be an asset.
Caradoc doesn't want children - or rather he doesn't want children now, when they are losing this war so badly and he may be hopeful, but he's also a realist. He's afraid for Narcissa Dearborn every time he leaves her alone no matter how well she takes to his combat magic lessons; if she were pregnant, if they had a child already...
...he doesn't need a hostess. He doesn't need someone to smile prettily and arrange fucking flowers; he doesn't need any of the things that Narcissa has been taught to be and she understands why it is the other women expect her to be grateful for this. It isn't that she doesn't want the equal partnership he expects - that is a blessing and his trust in her is crucial for them both when his mind is on war and someone has to handle their affairs - but rather that he's pulled the rug out from underneath her. She has no context for this life, no rules to fall back on when she's uncertain, and sometimes she's frankly irritated by the unfamiliarity. (Other times she looks at Lily Potter and thinks if Caradoc expected her to give him an heir now, she'd kill hm in his sleep.)
Taking a bride like her is unwise - he had to pursue her hoping she'd be willing to cut ties and knowing he couldn't tell her why until after she'd already agreed to do it - and Narcissa is not unaware that the suspicion and resentment that she chafes at is doubled on his shoulders. She's viewed as a potential weakness or a threat, but the reason that Caradoc had been able to steal her away in the first place is the fact that he has both the blood and the money to have been on the winning side if he wanted, and the Order knows that as well as they know that the man is dangerous. She'd be a boon there, too; instead Bellatrix is suspicious as her sister drifts further and further away from their ties. Instead, his eyes are cold and tired and Narcissa tells him one day that she thinks of having a child whether he likes it or not because he is going to die with this war one way or another and she doesn't want to have nothing to remind her that he used to smile.
When she betrays him-
-but she doesn't, she tells herself. Narcissa keeps her husband's secrets as jealously as she ever guarded her own, because they are her own and Lucius would never suspect he'd found a pit viper like her nestled against the Order's breast. It's Caradoc that she loves, forsaking all others, only all others had been a whole world she'd lived and loved in and what she does with Lucius is...familiar. It's the kind of secret she knows how to keep and she knows his world inside and out without having to ask or try. It isn't love, she promises herself, it's habitual and she needs to see and touch someone who doesn't always fuck her like he's saying goodbye. Caradoc is slipping away from her because war is cruel and Narcissa is tiredly aware that there's some kind of irony in seeking comfort in the confidence of someone who is in no small part responsible for the absence in her own home.
At no point does she ever permit this one weakness to become about politics; she won't bargain her way back into purist society on her husband's blood when as far as they're concerned, Caradoc is merely antisocial and prefers for his wife to share his lifestyle. She won't sacrifice Lucius to give the Order the edge she knows it would give them, either, though she's not denying to herself that she's never been sorely tempted. Lucius is...complex, and their relationship has always been volatile and ill-advised and more than either of them knew what to do with. In another life, she thinks she'd have made him a good wife; in this one the knots in her heart are too tangled to be good even for herself. She tells herself that she loves her husband as if that means she can't love Lucius, as if her infidelity is better somehow if it's meaningless, as if Caradoc is a talisman against her own sins. (She never concerns herself with Lucius's wife. He may deal with his betrayals as he likes; Narcissa has enough guilt for her own without shouldering his burdens as well.)
The problem is that she does love Caradoc, and she does love Lucius; war will take one or both and either way she may find herself condemned. None of the stories she watches unfolding next to her will have happy endings, but she is complicit in her own downfall and she thinks about it when she sits down next to Caradoc on the back step and accepts the other cigarette, keeping him company when he cannot cope with the weight of idealism that neither of them can believe has already survived this long. How, they wonder, can they still be so fucking naive?
"We're all going to die," he predicts, in a mockingly upbeat parody of some of the more hopeful pronouncements they've heard this week. Narcissa chokes on something that starts out as laughter and then isn't, and she presses her forehead against his shoulder and sighs until it evens out. "Mmmn," as if she'd said something for him to agree with, "that was deeply reassuring."
Her hair still smells like cigarette smoke when she goes to meet Lucius, later.