“Emily has agreed to help me walk Buttercup every morning,” Cecilia announced. “The beast is simply too much for me to manage alone.”
Emily’s face lit up like Christmas morning. “Really? Every day?”
“Every single day. Rain or shine. Though perhaps we’ll skip the blizzards.”
Emily threw her arms around Cecilia’s waist, then turned to Louise with hope blazing in her eyes. “May I? Please?”
Louise’s gaze found Aaron’s across the room. He saw everything she couldn’t say written in the depths of her eyes. The longing. The resignation. The questions she wouldn’t ask because she already knew the answers.
“Of course, darling.” Louise’s voice emerged steady despite the tears Aaron could see her fighting back. “We’ll visit every morning.”
“With Miss Whitfield, too?” Emily looked at the governess who had appeared in the doorway. “She’s teaching me German.”
“Ja, kleine.” Miss Whitfield smiled. “We will continue your lessons wherever you are.”
Within an hour, their meager belongings were packed. Aaron stood in the entrance hall, watching George direct the loading of a hired carriage. Louise helped Emily into her coat while the child clung to Buttercup, whispering promises into his fur.
“Every morning,” Emily told the dog solemnly. “I’ll bring treats from Cook.”
Buttercup’s tail drooped as if he understood perfectly.
Aaron wanted to speak, wanted to find words that would change everything. But his throat closed around every attempt. This was right. This was necessary. This was?—
Louise stood before him, properly distant, properly polite. “Thank you, Your Grace. For everything.”
Their eyes met, held. The world narrowed to that singular point of connection, everything they couldn’t say passing between them in silence. Aaron’s hand twitched toward hers, then fell.
She turned away and gathered Emily. Walked through his door and out of his life with footsteps that echoed like drumbeats in the marble hall.
Aaron stood frozen until the carriage rolled away, then retreated to his study. The brandy decanter called to him despite theearly hour. He poured three fingers, then set the glass down untouched.
The house felt cavernous. Empty. Wrong.
Through the window, he watched Buttercup pad through the garden, sniffing at places where Emily had played. The dog looked as bereft as Aaron felt.
“This is for the best.” He spoke aloud to the empty room, needing to hear the words even if he couldn’t believe them.
His mother’s poetry book sat on his desk where he’d left it the night before. It fell open to a page marked with his mother’s careful script beside Lord Byron’s words:
“The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain.”
His mother’s note read:“Better pain than numbness. Better to break than never to have bent. Love, even lost, proves we lived.”
Aaron closed the book and pressed his palms against his eyes. The hollow ache in his chest expanded with every breath, filling spaces that Louise and Emily had occupied with their laughter, their trust, their love, he didn’t deserve and couldn’t accept.
Cecilia appeared in the doorway without knocking. “You’re a fool.”
“So, I’ve been told.”
“They’re gone.”
“I’m aware.”
She crossed the room and placed her hand on his shoulder. “It’s not too late.”
Aaron looked up at his aunt, seeing his mother’s eyes in her face, his mother’s stubborn faith in love’s triumph.
“Yes,” he said quietly, finally. “It is.”
