“I’m not stupid, but I’m nothim,” he said, gesturing to Silas with his free hand. “You two were grown in the same garden. I bet you have a case review after domestic disagreements. Even when things were going well between us, I was confused half the time. You’d start rattling off wedding logistics, and I’d feel like blankets were piling on top of my brain, making me stupid. You’d tell me what your father was working on, and a little mouse named Panic would start chewing on my ribs because I couldn’t follow half of it.”
“Oh,” she said, and blinked again. “Really?”
“Yes, really!”
She smiled fully then, her teeth flashing like he’d just given her true joy. It was such a terrifying, genuine reaction that he began to laugh, and so she did too. They laughed together until it disturbed Silas, making him grumble and adjust in his sleep.
She was still chuckling silently, while Freddy had his hand cupped over his lips. But when they met each other’s eyes thistime, it felt somehow a little more connected, like a tiny, fragile bridge of insecurity and confession had started to stack itself into place between them.
Freddy felt something release inside him that had been clenched there for so long, he hadn’t even known it was there anymore. Just a tiny thing, a little fist around a dam of guilt. It didn’t vanish, but it eased. It let some of its holding through. And he breathed a little easier for it.
“What are you reading?” he asked, enjoying the extra space in his lungs. “Something legal?”
“Oh, not at all,” she answered, considering him like something in her had released too, perhaps. Something different, but matching. “It is a fairy story, a rather dark one, actually. Claire wrote it.”
He glanced back at the stack of pages in her lap with renewed interest. “Can I read it?”
“Oh,” she said, a little uncertain. “I don’t see why not, but I don’t think you really want to, Freddy. I think it is … well, I know it is about you.”
“Is it?” He pushed himself forward, leaning onto his knees to try to get a peek at it.
She immediately folded the sheets over themselves like a stern governess. “Yes! She wrote it many years ago, though. I think it is about … well, about what happened while you were still in Bruges.”
If she was attempting to put him off his curiosity, she was doing a terrible job of it.
“Whatdidhappen?” he asked softly, not wanting to spook her away from the subject. “I have always wondered exactly what the hell happened while I was locked away.”
She got an odd, wistful look on her face. Her eyes softened, her lips twisted, and she even seemed to color a little in the cheeks and throat. “That is a very complicated question,” she said, as though she were still thinking about how to answer. “You know, it never occurred to me that you are still in the dark about it all, but then, I think I still am too, about a few things. If I answer your questions, will you answer mine?”
“Of course,” he said immediately, too stupid to feel wary right away.
Dot glanced down at the box beside her and nodded toward it. “This is Claire’s box, you know. She calls it her dower chest. I am only entrusted with it because it holds the fairy tales she wrote when Oliver was still a baby. It holds a few other things too.”
“Oh?” he said, and then felt it, the little spark and sizzle of concern, and yet still was not intelligent enough to abort the conversation before it got too far. “Such as?”
“Things Millie wrote. Things I wrote. The gossip sheets, Freddy. I assume you know about those?”
His brows shot up. “I have heard tell,” he said, sounding a little strangled even to himself. “But I’ve never actually seen them.”
Dot sighed, shaking her head with a faint look of begrudging affection on her face that Freddy was certain was for Claire, not him. “I don’t know why she kept them, but she did. After you left me at the altar—”
“Dot!” he said, startled by it, but she only gave him a look and continued her thought.
“After that,” she said firmly, “I was left in dire financial straits. The money from the dissolution of Fletcher and Yardley had been intended for the wedding and my father’s care while you awaited the payout from your trust, if you recall. When you left, I had nothing to live on, and my father was still very sick from his apoplexy.”
“Jesus,” Freddy muttered. “Dot, I am so very sor—”
“Yes, I know,” she said, waving her hand as though it didn’t matter anymore, leaving him white-faced and captive. “If it weren’t for the financial stress, I might not have let Claire in when she arrived that day, bedraggled and throwing a bunch of jewelry at my feet, begging me to hide her. It was so surreal and alarming but also the exact answer to every problem that had been haunting me for almost two years. She begged me not to tell anyone, and so I didn’t. She was also very, very pregnant.”
Freddy could only stare. He could see it, almost, in his mind’s eye, and seeing it was horrifying.
“Once she’d settled, I started to feel angry at you all over again. Here was Claire, too real and warm and breathing to resent from a safe distance, but you were over there, locked away, clearly having driven her to this, and that was perfectly reasonable, wasn’t it? Perfectly reasonable to put it all on you. In fact, doing so made it easier to almost absolve Claire, to tell myself she had been an unwitting victim too, just another hapless thing sucked into your orbit. I do know that isn’t true now. I know it isn’t.”
“Oh,” said Freddy, because nothing else would come.
She frowned and let out a little sigh. “We wrote the gossip sheets because it felt like the only way to pay you back, in any fashion. It felt like the only way to feel as though we were not wounded by a man who still had no scars.”
He nodded, a little sick with the force of the knowledge. “I can see that,” he managed to say.
