The words hung weighted with carefully contained grief.
“You loved Nicholas too,” Maribel said softly. “Like a brother.”
“Yes.”
“And Oliver reminds you of him. Of everything you lost.”
His throat worked. “Every day. Every time I look at that child, I see Nicholas. The way he tilts his head when thinking. His smile. The way he trusts you completely, like Nicholas trusted Margaret. It’s unbearable.”
“Yet you bear it anyway.”
“What choice do I have?” Bitter, defeated. “I promised Nicholas I’d keep his son safe. But I don’t know how to be what that child needs. I don’t know how to be warm when I’ve spent years building walls against the sort of attachment that leads to this—this consuming grief.”
Something cracked in Maribel’s chest. She stepped closer. “Keeping distance doesn’t protect you. Doesn’t protect him. It only ensures you both suffer alone.”
“If I let myself care too much, love him the way Nicholas did, and something happens?—”
“Then you’ll grieve. As you’re already grieving, despite all your defences.” Her voice gentled. “You can’t prevent loss through emotional fortification. You can only ensure that when loss comes, you face it having lived and loved rather than merely walled yourself off in fear.”
Silence.
“I saw you,” she said quietly. “At Nicholas’s grave. The wildflowers. The way you spoke to him.”
He went rigid. “You shouldn’t have been there.”
“But I was. And I saw a man capable of extraordinary feeling despite every effort to convince himself otherwise.”
“Feeling is weakness.”
“Feeling is what makes us human.” She drew breath. “You left me a key. To the east wing. Why?”
His shoulders rose and fell. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“Then perhaps you should tell me.”
She ignored the bitterness. “I think you left it because some part of you recognises that sealing away the past hasn’t healed the wound. That opening those doors might let you breathe again.”
“Or it might destroy what little equilibrium I’ve managed to attain.”
“Is equilibrium truly what you have? Because you look like a man slowly suffocating under his own restraint.”
He turned, and the look in his eyes stole her breath—raw, desperate, hope warring with fear.
“What do you want from me, Maribel?”
The question hung between them.
What did she want? For him to lower his walls? Trust her with his grief? Look at her with something approaching warmth?
“I want you to stop punishing yourself for caring. For Oliver. For Nicholas’s memory. For?—”
“For you?”
Soft as snow.
Her pulse hammered. “I didn’t say that.”
