“No.” Nell touched her mouth, feeling the ghost of his kiss. Her fingers trembled slightly as she looked toward the empty doorway. “He doesn’t.”
She was smiling and found she couldn’t seem to stop.
The kitchen of the shop smelled of cinnamon and yeast, with late afternoon light slanting golden through the windows. Nell stood at the worktable, her hands buried in dough, and she watched her son from the corner of her eye.
Oliver sat at the smaller table by the hearth, whittling something she couldn’t quite make out. His knife moved in careful strokes, shaving curls of wood that drifted to the floor like pale snow. He’d been quiet all afternoon. He was quieter than usual, which was saying something for a boy who measured his words like a miser counting coins.
Lily had already bounced off to practice her flower girl walk for what must have been the hundredth time. This left mother and son alone with the bread and the silence.
“The wedding is in a week.” Nell maintained a steady, rhythmic motion as she worked the dough, her eyes pinned to the worktable. She pressed, folded, and turned the heavy mass with practiced ease. “Philippa says everything is arranged. The church, the breakfast afterward, the flowers...”
“I know.” Oliver didn’t look up from his whittling, his knife biting deeper into the wood.
“Lord Westmore’s friend Alistair will stand up with him as his witness.” She hesitated, watching the tension gather in her son’s shoulders like storm clouds. “We haven’t discussed who might… That’s, I wanted to ask if you...”
“I will do it.” The words scraped out, catching in his throat with that unpredictable, jagged quality that had begun to plague him as he hovered between boy and man. His knife stilled against the wood, and he finally looked up at her.
Nell’s hands stopped deep in the dough. “Do what?” She searched his face, her pulse quickening at his sudden, heavy gravity.
“Walk you down the aisle.” He didn’t look at her, his jaw set in a hard, pale line as his eyes fixed on the half-carved shape in his hands. “Give you away. Someone should do it. Since there’s no one else.” He shaved a long sliver of wood from the block, the movement jerky and uncoordinated.
The words landed in her chest like stones dropped in still water, rippling outward through places she kept carefully guarded.
“Oliver.” She moved around the table to stand beside him. “Look at me.”
He obeyed with a slow, reluctant turn of his head. His eyes were bright, shimmering with a vulnerability he was fighting with everything he had.
“You don’t have to.” She crouched until they were eye-to-eye, one hand resting on his knee.
“I want to.” His expression hardened into a stubborn mask she recognized from her own mirror. He gripped the whittling knife until his knuckles turned a bloodless white. “Someone should do it. Walk you down the aisle. Give you to someone who...” The words fractured, and he jerked his head away, blinking back the moisture. “Someone should.”
“Oh, love.” She reached out, her hand finding the tension coiled beneath his threadbare shirt.
He stiffened at her touch, a reflexive flinch before he allowed himself to lean, just an inch, into her warmth. Then his shoulders finally dropped.
“You don’t have to be the man of the house anymore.” She kept her words low, rubbing small circles against the ridge of his spine. “You don’t have to take care of me. That’s not your job. It never should have been.”
“Someone had to.” The defence was fierce, snapping through the quiet of the kitchen. He jabbed his knife into the tabletop, the blade sticking upright and quivering. “There was no one else. It was just us, and you were — you were always tired, Mama. Always working. And sometimes you would get this look, like something far away was hurting you, and I didn’t know what it was but I knew I had to make sure nothing hurt you here.”
Her heart cracked clean down the middle.
This boy. Her boy. He had never known Gabriel, never lived through the worst of it, but he had grown up in the long shadow of it. He had read the bruises that were already gone by the time he was born — not on her skin, but in the way she startled at a slammed door, in the way she checked the locks twice every night, in the hollow behind her smile when she thought no one was watching. He had appointed himself her protector without ever understanding what he was guarding her from.
“I know.” She pulled him into her arms. He resisted for a heartbeat — a final holdout of pride — before his foreheadthudded against her shoulder and his hands fisted in the fabric of her dress. “I know you did. And I am so proud of you, Oliver, so proud of the man you are becoming. But you can be a boy now. You can let someone else carry the weight.”
“Lord Westmore.” The name was a muffled vibration against her shoulder, thick and heavy with the tears he was finally letting fall.
“Yes.” She pressed a kiss to the top of his head, breathing in the familiar scent of wood shavings and youth.
A long pause followed. She could feel him gathering himself, the rise and fall of his breath as courage built for the question he needed to ask.
“Will he —” Oliver pulled back just enough to look at her face, his eyes red-rimmed but fierce. His throat worked around the words. “He won’t hurt you? He won’t — change?”
The question broke something loose inside her chest. He did not know the details. He did not know Gabriel’s name or what that man had done. But he knew, the way children always know, that something had happened to his mother before he existed. Something that left marks he could feel but never see.
“He won’t.” She cupped his face in her hands, holding his gaze. “I promise you. I would never marry a man who would hurt us. Never.”
“I know.” Oliver drew a shaky breath, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his thin throat. “I just — I wanted to make sure.”
