She sat, smoothed her skirts around her ankles in a remarkably demure gesture for a woman who could wrestle a sheep to the ground, and patted the grass at her side before popping open the lemonade and handing it to Archie. “Are you ready to talk now?”
He sat with an undignified grunt and took the lemonade, tossing back half of it in one go. “Why do you think I need to talk?”
She chuckled low in her chest. “Oh my dear boy. You forget who you’re talking to. Is this about your marchioness?”
He scowled as a fresh slash of pain burst across his chest. “She never was mine.”
“I disagree, but I’m not arguing that point now. I know you won her divorce.”
“How?” He’d assumed his mother and younger sisters remained oblivious to the goings-on in London.
“Well, you’re here. If you’d lost, you’d be in a library or your office fighting it. You don’t like to quit.” She shrugged. “You got that from me.”
Damnation. “Yes, we won.”
“And you believed you’d be together after the case ended?”
The incredulity in her tone raised his hackles. “Was I an idiot for thinking we would be?”
She patted his hand. “No, not a bit. But I suspect you overestimated her.”
He recoiled. “How did I do that?”
Her gaze softened as she watched the sheep, some fluffy and some shorn, frolic on the gently rippling grass. “What she went through… Well.” She huffed. “I don’t have to tell you what that does to a family.”
Archie stilled. In the decade since his father left, they’d never broached the topic, had let it float over them like a scowling, bruise-colored cloud. “She left. She’s away from him now.”
“The scars remain, Archie. Not just for her, but for her children. I know what it took from you. That’s why I told him to—”
She cut off with a caught breath, and Archie swung his attention to his mother. More lines fanned out from her eyes than he’d noticed the last time he’d been to the farm, perhaps because he’d been so caught up in Mari’s proximity. Something akin to anticipation crawled over his skin. A revelation perhaps, that poignant moment of breathless stillness before the ice shattered. “My father? What did you tell him to do?”
His mother leaned back on her hands. “I should have told you this years ago.”
“Mum,” he urged when she trailed off.
She huffed as though irritated with him. A common state, he had to admit. “I knew what he did to you, how you kept him from us.”
A torturous silence fell between them. She’d known? All that time, when he was certain he’d kept her from harm, at least the worst of it.
When he didn’t speak—another rare occurrence—she continued. “I couldn’t leave without you and your sisters going to a workhouse, so I had to wait. I was saving the entire time. Taking what I could and putting it away until I had enough.” She swallowed, shook her head. “I sent your father away, Archie. One night, when he came after you and… I didn’t have the strength to stop him. I waited until you were asleep and gave him every penny I had, told him to leave, never come back. I didn’t think he would go, but—”
Her voice trembled, and she stopped, looked down at her wringing hands.
“He left us,” he managed. “You sent him away.”
“You were getting stronger, but I knew, eventually, he’d stop holding back.” She stretched her hand out and caught his. “I wouldn’t take the risk.”
His chuckle was dark. “Everything you’d saved… Gone to that bastard.”
“The best purchase I ever made.” A dimple popped in her cheek when she smiled. “I got to watch you and your sisters grow up in the place I did. And now my grandchildren get to play here, too.”
Archie blinked, his mind unable to manage this rearrangement of ideas. “You… Christ, Mum, you—”
“I don’t regret my choice, and I don’t regret staying here. I know you and your sisters think I’m going to fall to my death withinthose walls—” she nodded towards the farmhouse, “but Iwantto stay here. You never asked me what I wanted.”
He heard the bitterness in her tone and dropped his chin. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
She shushed him. “Don’t be. You meant no harm.”
