“Is it? Or are you simply running away again?” Julian rose as well, his posture deceptively relaxed. “That seems to be your preferred method of managing difficult emotions. Seal them away. Lock the doors. Pretend they never existed.”
“You know nothing?—”
“I know everything.” Julian’s calm finally cracked, revealing the frustration beneath. “I know you are so terrified of grief that you have built a fortress against it. I know you would rather drive away everyone who might matter to you than risk the pain of losing them. And I know—” his voice dropped, “that Nicholas would be ashamed of what you have become.”
The words detonated like artillery fire.
Thaddeus heard Maribel’s gasp, saw Oliver flinch at the raised voices, felt his own control fracturing along fault lines he had spent years reinforcing. His hands were shaking—he pressedthem flat against the table to still them, but the tremors ran deeper than flesh and bone.
“Get out,” he said. Each word fell like a stone into deep water. “Get out of my house.”
Julian held his gaze for a long moment. Then he inclined his head with terrible courtesy. “As you wish, Your Grace.” He turned to Maribel, his expression gentling. “Your Grace. It was a pleasure, however brief. I hope we shall meet again under more pleasant circumstances.”
“Lord Westcott—” Her voice was strained. “Perhaps if you remained?—”
“I think not.” Julian offered her a small, sad smile. “Some truths require solitude to properly digest. But if I might offer one piece of advice before I take my leave?”
She nodded, mute.
“He is not as cold as he pretends to be.” Julian’s gaze flickered once more to Thaddeus, who stood rigid beside the table. “He has simply forgotten how to be anything else. Do not give up on him quite yet.”
He departed with the same unhurried grace with which he had arrived, and the morning room fell into a silence so complete Thaddeus could hear his own pulse hammering in his ears.
Oliver’s small voice broke it first. “Is Lord Westcott cross with you?”
Thaddeus could not form an answer. Could not explain that Julian was not angry but disappointed—which was infinitely worse. Could not articulate the ways in which every word Julian had spoken had been calculated to wound because only wounds broke through armour thick enough to withstand years of deliberate isolation.
Maribel rose from her chair, moving to Oliver’s side. “Why do you not take your soldiers upstairs, sweetheart? I shall come read to you shortly.”
“But breakfast?—”
“Mrs. Allen will send something up. Go on now.”
Oliver gathered his toys with the mechanical obedience of a child who had learned not to argue when adult voices carried particular weights. He paused at the doorway, looking back at Thaddeus with an expression that held equal parts confusion and something that might have been concern.
Then he was gone, and Thaddeus was alone with his wife in a room that suddenly felt far too small.
She did not speak immediately. Instead, she moved to the window, her back to him, her posture holding the same carefulstillness he had seen her employ when facing down his worst moods.
“Was he right?” she asked at last, her voice barely above a whisper. “About your mother’s rooms. About Nicholas. About all of it?”
Thaddeus’s jaw worked soundlessly. He wanted to deny it. Wanted to explain that Julian understood nothing, that the past eight years had been necessary, that keeping those doors locked was the only way to prevent the grief behind them from consuming everything in its path.
But the words would not come.
“I think,” Maribel said, still not turning, “that Lord Westcott cares for you a great deal. Enough to risk your anger in the hope of breaking through to whatever lies beneath all this control.” She drew a breath. “Enough to speak truths no one else dares voice.”
“He had no right?—”
“Perhaps not.” She turned then, and the morning light caught her face in profile—the elegant line of her jaw, the determined set of her mouth, the grief she carried without complaint because she understood, as Julian did, that some sorrows ran too deep for casual expression. “But he spoke them nonetheless. And now I find myself wondering whether I have been too patient. Too willing to accept the boundaries you impose because challenging them seems cruel.”
“Maribel—”
“Do not.” She raised a hand, forestalling whatever justification he might have offered. “Do not tell me this arrangement suits us both. Do not tell me the terms were clearly established. Do not—” her voice cracked, “pretend that last night never happened. Do not pretend once more that you are unfeeling, when I have seen that you are not.”
“I do not know what you want from me,” Thaddeus said. The admission cost him. “I do not know how to be what you need. What he needs. What anyone—” He stopped, the words dissolving before he could give them shape.
Maribel crossed the room with slow, deliberate steps. She stopped an arm’s length away—close enough that he could see the gold flecks in her dark eyes, close enough that her warmth reached across the space between them like an offered hand.
