"I agreed to boot shopping. But all the rest are acceptable, as well."
He surprised himself by laughing; a real laugh, unguarded and genuine. "You're remarkably adaptable."
"I've had to be." She settled closer to the fire, and after a moment, he did the same. They sat side by side, not quite touching, while the storm raged outside and the flames danced before them. "After my parents died, I had to learn to adapt or drown. The village helped, but ultimately, I had to choose to keep going. To find reasons to get up in the morning. To build a life out of the pieces that were left."
"How old were you?"
"Seven."
Almost the same age he'd been when his mother died. The parallel struck him with unexpected force.
"My mother died when I was six," he said quietly. "I remember... I remember the day they told me. My father called me into his study; I'd never been allowed in there before; it was forbidden territory, and he said:Your mother has passed. Hawthornes do not weep. You may return toyour lessons." He shook his head. "That was it. The entirety of his acknowledgement. And then I went back to my tutor and conjugated Latin verbs while my world fell apart."
"That's..." Lydia seemed to struggle for words. "That's monstrous."
"It was training. That's how my father saw it; everything was training for the role I would eventually assume. Emotions were a weakness. Attachment was vulnerability. The only thing that mattered was the title, the legacy, the continuation of afamily name that stretched back centuries." His voice had gone flat, the way it always did when he talked about his father. "He succeeded, I suppose. I learned not to feel things. Or at least not to show them."
"But you do feel them."
"Yes." He looked at her; at her face lit by firelight, her wet hair drying in waves around her shoulders, her eyes soft with something that might have been understanding. "I feel them. I just don't know what to do with them."
"Maybe you don't have to do anything with them. Maybe you just have to let them exist."
"Is that what you do?"
"At times when the weight of grief is too great, when I miss my parents so sorely I can scarcely draw breath, I let it remain. I do not attempt to mend it, nor to reason with it, nor to drive it away. I sit with it, as one might keep company with an ailing friend, and in time, it passes."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is. But it's also honest." She shifted slightly, and her shoulder brushed against his. "I think that's what you're looking for, isn't it? Honesty. A place where you can stop performing and just be."
The question hit him like a blow to the chest. Because indeed, that was exactly what he was looking for. What he had been looking for his entire life, without knowing how to name it.
Chapter 10
"How do you do that?" he asked. "See things so clearly?"
"I don't. Not always. But I see you." She met his eyes, and the firelight turned her gaze into something warm and dangerous. "I see the person behind the title. And I think... I think he's worth knowing."
"You can't know that. You barely know me."
"I know enough." She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. "I know you came to the fair even though you were terrified. I know you let children pet your horse when any other duke would have shooed them away. I know you bought four pies from a woman you'd never met and gave them away to strangers because someone told you it might help people like you."
"That doesn't mean…"
"I know you're sitting in an abandoned cottage in wet clothes, talking to a blacksmith's niece about your feelings, when you could be home in your manor with servants bringing you warm drinks and dry towels." She smiled, soft and knowing. "You're not here because you have to be. You're here because you want to be. That tells me more about you than a hundred years of proper introductions ever could."
Frederick felt something loosen in his chest; some knot of tension he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten it was there.
"My father would be horrified," he said. "If he could see me now."
"Your father sounds like he was horrified by most things."
"Only by anything that suggested human emotion or connection." Frederick stared into the fire, watching the flames dance. "He used to say that the Hawthornes were above ordinary sentiment. That our duty was to the title, to the legacy, to thecontinuation of a line that stretched centuries back. Everything else, friendship, love, happiness, was a distraction."
"And you believed him?"
"I didn't know there was another option. He was my father. He was the Duke. What he said was, by definition, correct." Frederick shook his head. "It wasn't until he died that I started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, he'd been wrong about everything."
