Because he had bound himself to another woman while his heart already belonged elsewhere.
Because the cowardice Violet had named in him wasn’t a cruelty—it was simply the truth.
And now he stood in the wreckage of choices he’d once convinced himself were necessary.
Violet’s voice, cutting clean and merciless, returned—
“You told me the child I carried made no difference.”
He had said that.
He had said that. And whether he understood it or not at the time, the guilt of it lived in him now like a brand. He had let the woman he loved fiercely—both then and now—slip through his fingers.
She had been his best friend, his love, his everything. How had he let that go? How had he made himself be so cruel?
His memories twisted painfully: the rose garden, her trembling hands, the tears filling her eyes, the way she whispered his name, begging him to listen—
And he had called her amusement.
A passing fancy, nothing more.
Then came the next realization, colder and sharper than anything before—
his mother’s lie.
She had mentioned it before—the story of Violet’s “dead soldier husband,” the fiction offered to the village when she bought the cottage.
He had never thought about it.
Never understood what it truly meant.
That tale hadn’t merely protected his reputation—
it had erased him from his own child’s life.
He felt sick.
He felt poisoned by the truth.
And worse—the image surfaced, unbidden—
Lily’s small face, curls as dark as her mother’s.
Violet’s smile echoed in miniature.
Her eyes the same as his.
His child.
A child he had no right to call his.
No right to reach for.
No right even to see.
His voice cracked out of him, ragged in the empty room—
“What have I done…”
