"Nonsense. He was being ridiculous, as usual. You had the answer, and you gave it. What were you supposed to do? Stay silent and let them argue for another hour while Daniel scowled at his drainage reports?"
"Staying silent would have been more proper."
"Proper is boring." Rosanne picked up her brush, examined it dubiously, and set it down again. "Besides, he acknowledged you. That is practically effusive, for Daniel. I once saw him nod at a footman who had saved him from stepping in a puddle, and it was the warmest human interaction I had witnessed from him all month."
Lillian thought of the duke's reluctant words,your reasoning was correct,and the visible effort it had taken for him to say them. There had been something almost painful about it, as though praise were a foreign language he had forgotten how to speak.
What made him this way?She wondered.What carved all the softness out of him and left only this; this rigid shell of a man who cannot admit admiration without choking on it?
She thought of Rosanne's whispered confession:They loved each other, you know. Desperately. Passionately. And it destroyed them both.
Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps he had watched love consume his parents and decided that any emotion was dangerous. That feeling itself was the enemy, to be controlled and contained and never, ever expressed.
It was a sad way to live. A lonely way.
"You are thinking about him," Rosanne observed, with the shrewdness of a girl who had spent her life studying the people around her for signs of danger.
Lillian started. "I beg your pardon?"
"You have that look. The one you get when you are turning something over in your mind, examining it from all angles." Rosanne smiled and she had a small, knowing expression on her face. "You were thinking about Daniel."
"I was thinking about the weather."
"You were not."
"The weather is very fine today."
"Lillian."
Lillian sighed, setting down the brush she had picked up. There was little point in dissembling; Rosanne was extremely observant.
"I was thinking," she said carefully, "about what might make a person so guarded. So reluctant to show any warmth, even when warmth would cost nothing."
Rosanne's smile faded into something more complicated. "You are thinking about our parents."
"You mentioned them once. You said they loved each other desperately, and it destroyed them."
"Did I?" Rosanne looked away, her fingers twisting in her lap. "I should not have. It is not a pleasant story."
"I do not wish to pry. But I find myself curious. About your brother. About what shaped him."
"You are curious about Daniel." Rosanne's voice was soft, her gaze still fixed on some middle distance. "That is more than most manage. Most people see the title and the coldness and the scowl, and they decide they know everything there is to know. They do not wonder what lies beneath."
"There is always something beneath."
"Yes." Rosanne turned back to face her, and there was something raw in her expression; a vulnerability that Lillian had glimpsed before but never seen so clearly. "Our parents loved each other in the way that stories tell you love should be; all-consuming, passionate, the sort of love that burns everything it touches. And that is exactly what it did. It burned everything."
Lillian waited, silent.
"They would fight," Rosanne continued, her voice dropping. "Terribly. Screaming matches that shook the walls, accusations and recriminations and cruelty designed to wound as deeply as possible. And then they would reconcile, just as passionately; tears and embraces and vows that this time would be different. But it never was. The cycle would begin again within days. Sometimes within hours."
"That must have been very difficult. For you and your brother."
"It was terrifying." The word came out flat, unadorned. "We never knew which version of our parents we would encounter; the ones who loved each other or the ones who seemed to hate each other. We learned to be quiet, to be invisible, to stay out of the way of whatever storm was brewing. Daniel learned... other things."
"What things?"
Rosanne hesitated, and for a moment Lillian thought she would not answer. Then she spoke again, her voice barely above a whisper.
