She watched them go inside, Sophia’s small form hunched, Tristan’s shoulders rigid. She waited until the door closed behind them, then sank onto the stone step.
You will never be her mother. You will never be anything more in their lives.
She wrapped her arms around herself, blinking up at the leaves overhead.
The truth stabbed at her chest; she wanted the impossible. She wanted this family.
CHAPTER 28
You are a fool, Evermere. A brute, a tyrant. You knew the child meant nothing by it, and yet you lashed out as if she had burned the estate to the ground.
Tristan sighed for the hundredth time that evening as he sat at his desk, his hands steepled atop a sheaf of untouched correspondence, and regarded the empty chair across from him as if it might leap up and bite him.
He pressed his thumb to the bridge of his nose, willing away the thoughts. But the questions were incessant.Why did you speak to Sophia that way? Why did you allow yourself to care so much?
Because hedidcare. That was the marrow of the problem.
He pulled open the top drawer of the desk, then reached for the little iron key he kept on a ribbon around his neck. He unlocked the lower compartment, feeling the soft resistance of the oldmechanism, and drew out the velvet pouch he had hidden there since the masquerade he attended.
He loosened the drawstrings and spilled the contents onto his palm: a pendant of amethyst, set in silver with its facets dulled with time and touch. He rolled it between his fingers, the weight familiar and very intimate. He had found it on the floor at Scarfield’s Ball, half-glimpsed in the chaos of midnight when the masks came off, and the world returned to its ugly, ordinary form. A trinket, left behind by a woman who had vanished as quickly as she appeared.
He had not known her name nor seen her face. But he remembered the waltz. He remembered the feeling of being seen.
That was the worst of it—the unshakable certainty that in that brief, impossible interval, he had been known. Not as Evermere, the Duke, the automaton of duty, but as himself. A man with hands and breath and, God help him, hunger.
He closed his fist around the pendant.
It was not the first time he had taken it out, though it had been a while since he had done that. Months ago, Tristan would retrieve the pendant and hold it, feeling as though he was in love with a stranger,
Now, however, Tristan had deeper feelings, all revolving around Lavinia, and as with the pendant, he must hide them in the darkest recesses of his mind.
He traced the edge of the amethyst and focused on the flaw that ran through the center, visible only if you held it to the light, like a scar in miniature.
Would Lavinia have liked something like this? Tristan wondered. That thought was interrupted by a knock on the study door, sharp and decisive.
“Who is it?” he called, making no effort to hide the weariness in his voice.
“Sappherton,” came the answer.
“Enter.” Tristan left the pendant in the open, letting it rest in the cup of his palm as Henry walked inside.
Henry glanced at the pendant and raised one eyebrow. “Sentimental, even for you,” he said. “I would have guessed your collection ran to coins and contracts, not baubles.”
Tristan did not dignify it with a response.
Henry sat, sprawling his long frame across the opposite chair with the careless ease of a cat. “You missed the auction at Rowley’s. Lord Byron’s letters went for a sum that would scandalize a bishop. I thought you might be tempted.”
“I have never found poets especially useful,” Tristan said.
“Nor, I suspect, have you ever found amethysts useful. Yet here we are.” Henry nodded at the pendant, the corners of his mouth tugged up. “Unless you mean to propose to someone.”
Tristan’s fist closed around the pendant, hard enough to leave an imprint. “It is nothing but a trifle.”
“Everything is a trifle with you,” Henry observed. “Except when it is not.” He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. “So. Which woman left you so bereft of sense?”
Tristan’s pulse thumped in his throat. “It was at the Scarfield Ball. The last of the season.” Perhaps telling his friend what occurred that night and how it had changed him might help him make sense of it.
Henry whistled. “A full quarter of London’s ladies attended. Narrow it down, if you can.”
