The words struck like a blow beneath the ribs—silent, shattering, merciless.
Pregnant.
Violet had been carrying his child.
And the last time he had seen her—
Her face, white with hurt.
Her voice, shaking—
“But—what about the letters I sent to you? Do you not care, after all I said?”
At the time, he had not understood her.
He had not stopped to think.
He had been so focused on forcing out the words he had rehearsed—words he could barely speak without breaking—that he’d seized upon the first escape from feeling.
And he had said them—
“Your letters said all I needed to know.”
His stomach turned. The floor seemed to tilt, a cold sweat breaking at the back of his neck.
To her, that sentence would have meant—
He had read her letters.
He knew she was with child.
He left her anyway.
Married another anyway.
Her voice echoed as if she stood in the room with him—
“You mean… you read what I wrote, and it meant nothing to you?”
God. God.
No wonder she had looked at him as if he had torn the world from beneath her feet.
No wonder she had called him a coward.
No wonder it had looked as though he had killed something sacred in her.
He had believed he was sparing them both ruin—doing what was right, what duty demanded.
But from where she stood?
He was the man who abandoned her knowing she bore his child.
Somewhere beyond the roar in his ears, his mother was speaking.
“—we sent her away,” she was saying, the words forcing themselves into the space between heartbeats. “I told her you would bring your bride home, and that her presence—and the child’s—would shame you. I reminded her that her parents’ positions depended upon her good sense.”
She spoke as if the dam had finally broken—words rushing out after years of silence, too long held back to be measured.
