“And the garden?”
“I am restoring it. Old Brennan has been helping me with advice and supplies. I intend to see it bloom again by spring.” Her voice remained steady despite the colour rising in her cheeks. “You gave me the key, Thaddeus. I assumed—perhaps wrongly—that you wished me to use it.”
He had given her the key. Had placed it where she would find it because some part of him—some desperate, buried part—had known he could not open those doors alone.
“Look at him,” Maribel said softly, nodding toward the stables. “Actually look at him rather than seeing only your own fears reflected.”
Thaddeus turned back toward the open stable doors.
Oliver had climbed onto a hay bale, directing Thomas in the placement of their fortress walls with the particular seriousness of a general planning defence. His small face glowed with concentration and joy—the sort of uncomplicated happiness that came from being precisely where one wished to be, doing precisely what one wished to do.
With a friend.
The word settled into Thaddeus’s chest, heavy with implications he could no longer avoid. Thomas was Oliver’s friend. Perhaps his only friend. And Thaddeus had been prepared to deny him that—to isolate the boy further—because attachment terrified him more than Oliver’s loneliness.
“He’s happy,” Maribel said, her voice barely above a whisper. “When was the last time you saw him so utterly, completely happy?”
Thaddeus’s throat worked. He could not remember. Could not recall a single moment since Nicholas’s death when Oliver had looked so free.
“You think me cruel,” he said roughly.
“I think you terrified.” Her voice gentled. “I think you have convinced yourself that distance protects when all it does is ensure suffering in isolation. I think—” She stopped. Drew breath. “I think you are capable of so much more than you permit yourself. If you would only try.”
Trying is more than most manage.
Eleanor’s words, spoken to Maribel but somehow reaching him now through the afternoon air. Through the space between them that felt simultaneously vast and vanishingly small.
He was trying. In his own inadequate, halting way. Leaving keys. Watching children play. Standing in gardens his mother had loved whilst grief pressed against his ribs like a physical weight.
“I went to see Julian,” Thaddeus heard himself say. “This morning. In London.”
Maribel turned to face him fully. “And?”
“And he said...” Thaddeus stopped. The words Julian had spoken felt too raw, too revealing. But Maribel waited with that particular patience he had come to recognise—the sort that suggested she would stand here all afternoon if necessary, giving him space to find whatever honesty he could manage.
“He said I cannot protect people by pushing them away,” Thaddeus finished quietly. “That I have tried that approach. That it does not work.”
“No,” Maribel agreed. “It does not.”
“I don’t know how to stop.” The admission cost him. “I don’t know how to lower walls I have spent eight years building. Don’t know how to risk—” He could not finish.
“Then perhaps,” Maribel said softly, “you might begin small. With one decision at a time. One moment of choosing connection over isolation.”
She gestured toward the stables. Toward Oliver and Thomas and their straw fortress and their shared laughter.
“Let them play,” she said. “That is all I ask. Let him have this one friendship. This one source of uncomplicated joy. Can you do that?”
Thaddeus looked at the boys. Looked at his wife with her muddy dress and earth-stained hands and eyes that held no judgment—only patient hope.
Julian’s voice echoed through his memory:You’re trying. The question is whether you’ll let her see it too.
“One hour,” he heard himself say. “They may have one hour. Three times weekly. Supervised.”
Maribel’s face transformed. The smile that broke across it was bright enough to rival the afternoon sun, and Thaddeus felt something shift in his chest—something that had been frozen beginning to thaw.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He could not respond. Could not trust his voice. Instead, he turned back toward the house, his heart hammering against his ribs.
