“Yes,” Thaddeus muttered, moving toward the foyer. “I promise you… you will see her again.”
Oliver looked up at him for a long time, then nodded and turned to walk toward the carraige. The boy did not look back. Did not wave. He sat in the seat and stared straight ahead as the door closed.
The carriage pulled away.
Thaddeus stood at the top of the steps until it disappeared from view. Then he turned and walked back inside.
The house swallowed him whole.
Silence pressed down from every direction—thick and suffocating and absolute. His footsteps echoed against marble floors.
He pulled the estate ledgers toward him and opened to the page he had marked the previous evening. The columns of numbers sat arranged in perfect order, awaiting his review. He picked up his pen, dipped it in ink, and held it poised above the first entry.
His gaze drifted to the window.
He forced it back. Read the first line. Then read it again. The numbers remained stubbornly abstract—symbols on a page that refused to coalesce into meaning.
He set down the pen and reached for his correspondence instead. Three letters requiring responses. All routine. All well within his capacity to manage.
The first was from his solicitor regarding a tenant dispute. He read the opening paragraph twice and still could not have said what it contained. His eyes moved across the words without comprehension, his mind circling endlessly back to Oliver, on his way to Ashford. To Maribel’s face as she had looked at him in Lady Eleanor’s drawing room.
The clock on the mantel struck noon.
Thaddeus closed the letter. Pushed back from his desk. Rose and crossed to the window where he stood for several long moments watching nothing in particular.
Then he turned and left the study, his footsteps echoing through corridors that felt too large and too empty, carrying him nowhere with relentless purpose.
Every room was perfect. Every surface gleamed. Every item sat precisely where it should be.
And every room felt dead.
He found himself in the entrance hall again as afternoon light slanted through the windows. Mrs. Allen passed with an armful of linens, her gaze sliding away from his.
“Mrs. Allen.”
She stopped, curtsied. “Your Grace?”
“The house seems... quiet.”
Something passed across her face—pity, perhaps, or contempt poorly hidden. “Yes, Your Grace. It does.”
She continued on her way without another word.
Thaddeus stood alone in the vast entrance hall and felt the weight of what he had done settle over him like a shroud.
Night fell early, bringing with it a darkness that seemed to seep through the walls.
Thaddeus wandered through the house without purpose, unable to settle, unable to think. His study felt oppressive. His chamber felt like a cell. The dining room mocked him with its empty chairs and untouched settings.
He found himself, eventually, standing before the sealed corridor of the east wing.
He had not walked this passage in eight years. Had ordered it closed after his mother’s death, after his father had finally stopped sitting in her rooms weeping over her embroidery, her books, her garden plans spread across the desk.
But Maribel had opened it.
Had walked these halls, cleaned these rooms, let light back into spaces that had been nothing but darkness for nearly a decade.
Thaddeus pushed open the double doors.
