“I presume nothing. I observe.” She held his gaze, refusing to look away. “I observe that you have sealed your mother’s rooms for eight years. I observe that you cannot speak of Nicholas without flinching. I observe that every person in this household walks on eggshells around you, terrified of disturbing your precious order.”
“Enough.”
“It is not nearly enough.” She straightened, releasing the desk, standing before him with all the stubborn defiance she possessed. “Oliver has lost everything. His mother. His father. Every friend and familiar face he ever knew. He has one chance—one—at connection with a child his own age, and you snatched it away because it did not fit your schedule.”
“He must learn?—”
“He must learn what? That love leads to loss? That hope ends in disappointment?” Her voice had risen, and she did not care. “He is learning those lessons well enough already, Your Grace. He does not need your help.”
Thaddeus’s hands were trembling. She saw it despite his efforts to conceal it—the fine tremor that ran through his fingers, the white-knuckled tension of his fists. Something had cracked behind his eyes, something he was fighting desperately to contain.
“You do not understand,” he said, and his voice had gone rough. “You cannot possibly understand?—”
“Then explain it to me.” She stepped closer, close enough to see the rapid pulse at his throat. “Explain why a grieving child must be kept from the simple pleasure of catching frogs with a boy his own age. Explain why friendship is a threat. Explain why this house feels more like a mausoleum than a home.”
The silence stretched between them. Maribel could hear her own heartbeat pounding in her ears, could feel the weight of everything unsaid pressing against her chest.
Thaddeus drew a breath. For one moment—one suspended, impossible moment—she thought he might answer. Thought the walls might crumble, thought she might glimpse whatever lay beneath that rigid facade.
Then he pursed his lips and once more erected the impenetrable walls around him.
“You may go, Lady Blackwood.”
“Thaddeus—”
“That will be all.”
He turned away from her, presenting his back, staring out the window toward the grounds where two boys had stood moments before, where one small hope had been extinguished before it could take flame.
Maribel stood frozen. Her throat ached with words she could not speak, arguments she could not win. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to tear down those walls with her bare hands, to force him to feel something, anything, beyond this terrible emptiness.
But she could not reach him. Not today. Perhaps not ever.
“Nicholas,” she said quietly, “trusted you with his son. He believed you would give Oliver what he needed. I wonder if he could have imagined this.”
She left without waiting for a response.
It took all she did not to slam the door, to close it gently despite the rage that coursed through her at this man’s stubborn pride.
In the nursery above, Oliver would be sitting with Mrs. Allen, drinking his tea with mechanical obedience, all the light gone from his eyes. Tomorrow he would wake and follow his schedule and speak when spoken to and never, ever expect anything to be different.
Unless she changed it.
Maribel lifted her chin. Her hands had steadied. The cold, hard thing in her chest had crystallised into something she recognised: determination.
She walked toward the east wing.
The corridor stretched before her, empty and silent, the faded blue wallpaper watching her passage. At its end, the carved doors waited—roses and ivy, dust and tarnished brass, eight years of sealed-away grief.
She stared at the doors silently for a while, then pressed her hand to it. “What happened to him?” she whispered to the invisible woman, hidden behind the locks. “What happened to make him so hard?”
Sooner or later, she would find the key, Maribel decided. Some doors were meant to be opened, whether the man who locked them wished it or not.
CHAPTER 7
“Did my papa like soldiers too?”
The question floated across the breakfast table with the innocence only a child could possess, landing squarely in the middle of a silence that had been carefully maintained for nearly a quarter of an hour.
