“It’s not all right.” His voice came out thick and miserable. “I made him angry again. I always make him angry.”
“You did not?—”
“I did. And now he’ll send me away like—like—” A sob choked off whatever he’d been about to say.
Maribel’s chest constricted. “Oliver. Look at me.”
He raised his tear-streaked face.
“His Grace is not going to send you away. Do you understand? You live here. This is your home.”
“But if I’m bad?—”
“You are not bad. You caught a frog with a friend. There is nothing bad about that.”
“Then why was he so angry?”
Because he’s terrified, Maribel thought. Because he has sealed away every person he’s ever loved and convinced himself that distance equals safety. Because he watched his mother die and his friend die and now he’s convinced that caring for you means risking the same unbearable loss.
But she could not say any of that to a four-year-old child.
“Sometimes,” she said instead, “grown-ups worry too much. They see danger where there isn’t any because they care so much it frightens them.”
“Does he care about me?”
The question landed like a blow.
“Yes,” Maribel said firmly. “Yes, sweetheart. He cares for you very much. He simply... doesn’t know how to show it.”
Oliver considered this with the gravity of extreme youth. Then: “Do you think if I was very, very good, he might let me see Thomas again?”
Maribel closed her eyes against the ache. “I think,” she said carefully, “that we shall have to wait and see.”
She stayed with him until he fell asleep, his breathing evening out into the rhythms of exhausted childhood. Then she slipped from the nursery with her heart heavy and her thoughts churning.
Sleep would not come.
She tried—lay in her bed for what felt like hours, watching shadows shift across the ceiling whilst rain began again against the windows. But her mind would not settle. Kept returning to Thaddeus’s face when he’d spoken of protecting Oliver. To the fear beneath his anger. To the way his hands had shaken before he’d hidden them.
Finally, near midnight, she gave up.
The library was dark when she entered, lit only by the embers dying in the grate. She moved toward the shelves by instinct, running her fingers along leather spines until she found something—anything—that might quiet her thoughts.
“You may stay. I’m not so petty as to hoard an entire room.”
Maribel spun.
Thaddeus sat in one of the wing-backed chairs near the fireplace, a book open on his lap, candlelight catching the hard planes of his face. She had not seen him in the shadows—had thought herself alone.
“I did not mean to intrude,” she said.
“You did not.” He gestured toward the opposite chair without looking up from his page. “The library is as much yours as mine.”
The invitation—if it could be called that—was ungracious enough to be almost rude. But beneath the curtness, she heard something else. Not quite welcome, but not refusal either.
She selected a slim volume of poetry and settled into the chair he’d indicated.
Neither spoke.
