And in doing so, he had become the source of the very harm he claimed to prevent.
His breath came sharp and shallow. His hands shook. The careful composure he had maintained for three days splintered into pieces.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” he said. The words emerged broken. “I don’t know how to—Julian, I have destroyed everything. Everything. And I don’t know how to make it right.”
Julian studied him for a long moment. Then, slowly, his expression softened.
“Good.”
Thaddeus looked up, uncomprehending.
“That’s the first honest thing you’ve said in years,” Julian said quietly. “You don’t know how to fix it. You don’t have aplan, a strategy, a carefully ordered approach that will restore everything to proper working order.” He crossed to the door, then paused at the threshold. “So perhaps it’s time to stop trying to control the outcome and simply do what you should have done from the beginning.”
“Which is?”
“Tell your wife the truth. All of it. Without reservation or defence or any attempt to justify what you’ve done. And then...” Julian met his gaze steadily. “Then you let her decide whether you deserve a second chance.”
“And if she says no?”
“Then you live with the consequences of your choices. Like the rest of us.” Julian pulled open the door. “I’m returning to London tonight. I suggest you spend the time between now and then determining what kind of man you want to be. Because the one you’ve been is not working.”
He left without another word.
Thaddeus sat alone in the study as darkness gathered beyond the windows.
Julian’s words echoed in the silence, each one a small blade finding its mark with surgical precision. But beneath the pain, beneath the shame and the grief and the terrible clarity of everything he had destroyed, something else stirred.
Not hope, but perhaps the faint, fragile possibility of change.
He thought of his mother’s sitting room where he had wept three nights ago. Maribel had taken spaces consumed by grief and made them habitable again. Had shown him, without words, that healing was possible. That rooms sealed in darkness could be opened to light.
That walls built to protect could be taken down.
He thought of Oliver at Ashford. Sitting alone. Waiting for someone who would not come because Thaddeus had sent her away. Learning, day by day, that love meant loss and that the people who were supposed to care for him could not be trusted.
He thought of Maribel. Of the way she had looked at him as she left—not with anger, but with pity. The pity of someone who saw exactly what he was throwing away and knew he would regret it.
She had been right.
Thaddeus rose on unsteady legs and crossed to the window.
The rain had stopped. Pale moonlight broke through the clouds, illuminating the gardens below. And there, just visible in the silvered darkness, the roses bloomed along the stone wall.
Maribel’s garden. Maribel’s restoration. Evidence of what could be saved if someone was brave enough to try.
He pressed his palm against the cold glass.
For twenty years, he had believed that strength meant control. That safety lay in distance. That the way to survive loss was to refuse to love in the first place. And he had been irredeemably wrong.
The question was: could he learn to be different?
Could a man who had spent decades building walls learn to take them down? Could someone who had made himself invulnerable through isolation learn to risk vulnerability instead?
He did not know.
But standing in the empty study of his empty house, with nothing left to lose because he had already lost everything that mattered, Thaddeus Blackwood made a choice.
He would try.
