Thaddeus could not answer. Could not form words around the truth lodged in his throat like broken glass.
The silence stretched between them, broken only by rain against the windows and the distant rumble of thunder.
Finally, Julian spoke again, and this time he sounded rather more sympathetic.
“She didn’t leave because you failed her. She left because you wouldn’t even try.”
The words struck with devastating accuracy. Thaddeus felt something inside him—some last bastion of defence—crumble entirely.
“I don’t know how,” he whispered.
“How to what?”
“How to...” He gestured helplessly. “How to be what she needs. What he needs. How to... feel these things without being consumed by them. My father—after my mother died, he—” His voice broke. “I watched him fall apart. Watched grief destroy him so thoroughly that he might as well have died with her. And I swore I would never—I could not?—”
“Your father loved your mother,” Julian said quietly. “But he also pushed away everyone who tried to help him. He locked himself in grief the same way you’ve locked yourself in fear. He wasn’t destroyed by loving her, Thaddeus. He was destroyed by his refusal to let anyone else in after she was gone.”
Thaddeus closed his eyes against the burn of tears. “I don’t know the difference.”
“Yes, you do. You just refuse to see it.” Julian rose and crossed to the window, staring out at the rain-soaked grounds. “Love isn’t control. It’s risk, willingly taken. It’s choosing to need someone even though you know—you absolutely know—that you could lose them. And doing it anyway. Because the alternative...” He turned back. “The alternative is this. A perfectly maintained house with no one in it. A life so carefully ordered that it contains nothing worth living for.”
Thaddeus’s hands trembled. He pressed them flat against the desk to still them.
“The boy,” Julian said, his voice dropping. “Tell me about Oliver.”
“He is at school. As planned.”
“And do you know how he is doing?”
“I trust that he is... adjusting.”
“You do, do you?” Julian’s expression hardened again. “Because I stopped at Ashford on my way here. Spoke with the headmaster. Would you like to know what he told me?”
Thaddeus felt dread pool in his stomach. “Julian?—”
“The boy doesn’t play. Doesn’t speak unless directly addressed. Sits alone during meals, during recreation, during every moment he’s not required to be elsewhere.” Julian’s voice remained level, but fury simmered beneath it. “He asks for Maribel every single day. The staff have stopped answering because there’s nothing to tell him except that she’s gone and you sent him away.”
It was exactly why he had not visited yet. It was all that he had been afraid of and Thaddeus could feel his throat closing up, until he could barely breathe.
“I had to explain to the headmaster that his guardian had abandoned him after the death of his parents.”
“That is not—I did not abandon?—”
“What would you call it?” Julian’s control finally cracked, his voice rising. “You drove away his aunt—the only family he has left—because you started caring for her. And before giving the boy a chance to grieve, you sent him to school. Did you truly send him because it was the only option for a proper education, or was it because you could not stand loving him either?”
“Stop.”
“No.” Julian strode back to the desk, his hands braced against the surface. “You wanted to protect him. You told yourself everything you did was for his benefit. But look at what your protection has done. A five-year-old child sits in a dormitory fifty miles from here believing that everyone he loves disappears. That affection is temporary. That the adults responsible for him will inevitably abandon him.” His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. “You have taught him, Thaddeus, that love is loss. And he has learned that lesson so well that he has stopped trying to love anyone at all. Does that not sound rather familiar?”
Thaddeus felt his vision blur. The study seemed to tilt around him, the walls closing in.
“I wanted him safe.”
“From what? From caring? From being cared for?” Julian straightened. “He was safe, you fool. He had Maribel. He had you, when you chose to show up. He had the beginning ofsomething that could have been a family. And you destroyed it because you couldn’t tolerate your own fear.”
Thaddeus closed his eyes against the verbal assault from his friends. He knew this, of course he did.
He had not been protecting Oliver. He had been protecting himself. He’d been selfish.
