That was when he looked up and saw Tobias.
The boy froze, his small face going comically still as his brown eyes—Amelia’s eyes, thank God—widened with the sort of profound shock only a child could manage. His mouth formed a perfect O of surprise.
Then recognition flickered across his features, tentative at first, then blazing into something that made Tobias’s vision blur at the edges.
“Papa?”
The word was uncertain, half-formed, more question than statement. But clear. Devastatingly, impossibly clear.
Tobias felt his heart stop. Then start again, beating so hard he wondered if the entire household could hear it.
“Lad,” he managed, his voice rougher than he’d intended. He crossed the room and crouched to Henry’s level, bringing himself face-to-face with the child who’d haunted his dreams for six months. “Did you miss me, then?”
Henry’s answer came not in words but in action. The boy launched himself forward with the fearless enthusiasm of the very young, small arms wrapping around Tobias’s neck with enough force to nearly topple them both. He pressed his face against Tobias’s shoulder and repeated that word—papa, papa, papa—as though testing its weight, its truth.
“Close enough, lad,” Tobias murmured, ruffling the dark curls that smelled of soap and sunshine. His throat felt impossibly tight. “Close enough indeed.”
He should correct the boy. Should explain that he was Uncle Tobias, that papa was someone else, someone gone. But the words lodged somewhere between his heart and his mouth, refusing to emerge. And when Henry pulled back to beam at him with such uncomplicated joy, such perfect trust, Tobias found he couldn’t bear to dim that light.
“Did you bring me something?” Henry demanded with the shameless acquisitiveness of childhood. “From London?”
Despite everything, Tobias laughed. “Mercenary little creature, aren’t you? Let me look at you properly first.” He held the boy at arm’s length, studying him with an intensity that bordered on ridiculous. The changes were everywhere. He’d grown taller, his baby roundness giving way to the leaner lines of toddlerhood.His hands were larger, his legs steadier, his entire bearing more confident.
Six months. Six months of Henry’s life he’d missed entirely. Six months of first words and discoveries and laughter he’d never hear.
The loss of it struck with unexpected force.
“You’ve grown,” he said, his voice catching on the observation. “Quite the young gentleman now, I see.”
“I’m big now,” Henry informed him solemnly.
“You are indeed… Soon you will be the one to pick me up!”
Henry giggled at the teasing tone even if he couldn’t grasp the words, and the sound—that pure, unguarded delight—made something in Tobias’s chest crack open wider.
I’ve missed you, he wanted to say. Every day. Every hour. You’ve no idea how the absence of you hollowed me out completely.
But such confessions were hardly appropriate to burden a child with. So instead, he simply held Henry closer and pressed his face briefly against those soft curls and breathed in the scent of him—milk and innocence and everything good in a world that so often felt irredeemably dark.
“Lord Tobias.”
The voice—quiet, composed, achingly familiar—made his entire body go rigid.
He looked up.
And forgot, quite comprehensively, how to breathe.
Amelia stood in the doorway, one hand resting lightly against the frame as though she needed its support. She wore a day dress of pale blue muslin that caught the afternoon light, her hair was arranged in soft curls, rather than the severe style she’d favoured during mourning. But it wasn’t the dress or the hair that arrested him so completely.
It was her.
She looked... alive. That was the only word his stunned mind could supply. The pale, fragile widow he’d left behind—the ghost who’d drifted through Redmond Park’s corridors like a wraith seeking permanent escape—was gone entirely. In her place stood someone he recognized and didn’t recognize in equal measure.
Colour bloomed in her cheeks, natural and warm. Her eyes, those blue eyes that had been so carefully shuttered before, now held a light he’d glimpsed only in rare, unguarded moments. Her posture had changed too—still elegant, still graceful, but lackingthat terrible brittleness that had suggested she might shatter at any moment.
She looked like a woman who’d finally stopped merely surviving and remembered how to live.
And she was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t quite read—surprise certainly, perhaps pleasure, but beneath it something more complicated. Something that made his pulse quicken for reasons that had nothing to do with the journey’s exertion.
