“What are you doing?”
The voice cut through her concentrated focus like a blade through silk. Maribel straightened too quickly, her hand flying to her chest where her heart had begun hammering with startled force.
Thaddeus stood at the garden’s edge, his tall frame rigid with tension, his face carved from winter itself. He had clearly been riding—his coat bore evidence of exertion, his hair windswept despite obvious attempts to restore order. And his expression held something that made her stomach twist with apprehension.
Anger. Unmistakable and barely leashed.
“I am tending the garden,” Maribel said carefully, removing her soiled gloves with deliberate precision. “Old Brennan has been assisting with the heavier work, but I wished to?—”
“You had no right.”
The words emerged flat, devoid of inflection yet somehow more cutting than shouted fury might have been. Thaddeus moved closer, each step measured, his hands clasping behind his back in that gesture she had learned signified his desperate attempt at control.
“No right to open these spaces. No right to disturb what was deliberately left alone. No right to presume you might simply—” He stopped, his throat working visibly. “You should have asked permission.”
“You gave me the key,” Maribel countered, lifting her chin despite the heat flooding her cheeks. “I assumed?—”
“You assumed incorrectly.”
They stood perhaps ten feet apart, the fountain between them, eight years of accumulated neglect bearing mute witness to this confrontation. Maribel watched him struggle—saw the war waging behind those grey eyes, the tension thrumming through every line of his frame.
This was about more than gardens, she understood suddenly. More than propriety or proper procedure. This was about control—about the careful boundaries he maintained against anything that might threaten the walls he had spent nearly a decade constructing.
“I am sorry.” She spoke quietly, refusing to look away despite the intensity of his regard. “I should have sought explicit permission. I allowed my enthusiasm for restoration to override proper consideration for your—” She paused, selecting her words with care. “For your grief.”
His entire body stiffened and for one terrible moment she believed he might simply turn and leave, might retreat behind those impenetrable walls and refuse to engage further.
But he remained right where he was, staring not at her but at the garden surrounding them. At the cleared pathways and defined beds. At the fountain she had been clearing. At the rose canes Old Brennan had carefully tended.
At the evidence of life returning where he had deliberately maintained only emptiness.
“My mother planted those roses.” His voice emerged barely above a whisper, scraped raw. “The red ones near the conservatory entrance. She said they reminded her of her childhood home—said the scent brought back memories of happiness before duty and expectation became her primary concerns.”
Maribel held herself perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe lest any movement shatter this moment of unexpected vulnerability.
“I thought they were dead,” Thaddeus continued, still not meeting her gaze. “Thought everything she had planted here had died along with her. That this place had become merely anothermonument to loss—something to be sealed away and forgotten because remembering hurt too damned much.”
He fell silent then, and Maribel watched his shoulders rise and fall with breaths that came too quickly, too shallow. Watched his hands clench white-knuckled behind his back. Watched grief and fury and desperate longing chase across his features in rapid succession.
“But they are not dead,” she said gently. “They were merely neglected. Waiting for someone to remember them. To tend them again.”
His gaze finally met hers—grey and stormy and holding such anguish that her own throat tightened sympathetically.
“I cannot—” He stopped. Tried again. “I do not possess the strength to witness beauty return here. To see roses bloom that she planted. To imagine spring arriving and transforming this space into what it once was when she?—”
He could not finish. Could not voice whatever torment gripped him. But Maribel understood nonetheless—understood that restoration felt like betrayal, that allowing joy back into spaces associated with loss seemed to diminish the departed, that moving forward required abandoning the past and he could not bear such abandonment.
“She would have wanted this,” Maribel said quietly. “Your mother. She would have wanted her garden tended. Her rosesblooming. Beauty perpetuated rather than permitted to die simply because she could no longer witness it.”
“You presume to know what she would have wanted?”
“I presume to know that mothers do not typically wish their grief-stricken sons to seal away everything they loved. To spend eight years avoiding rooms and gardens because memory proves too painful.” She took one careful step toward him, then another, closing the distance whilst watching his face for signs she had overstepped. “I presume to know that love—genuine love—does not demand such monuments to sorrow. Does not require the living to entomb themselves alongside the dead.”
Thaddeus stared at her, and for one suspended moment she believed her words had reached him. Believed she glimpsed understanding dawn behind those winter-grey eyes.
Then he turned away.
“Do as you wish with the garden,” he said, his voice empty. “I shall not interfere further.”
