"I do the same thing. Especially at Fordshire Park. Every corner holds some memory of him."
"Is that why you've been avoiding it?"
The question caught Harriet off guard. "I haven't been avoiding it."
"You haven't visited in over a year. Your mother mentioned it in her last letter to me."
"My mother writes to you?"
"Occasionally. She was... kind to me, after Richard died. When others weren't."
The implication hung in the air between them.When others weren't. When Harriet had sent him away and refused to let him grieve alongside the family he had loved.
"I didn't know," she said.
"Why would you? We've hardly been on speaking terms."
"No. We haven't."
Another silence, this one heavy with things unsaid. Harriet found herself studying Sebastian's face, the sharp lines of his cheekbones, the stubborn set of his jaw, the way the firelight caught the silver strands she hadn't noticed before, threaded through his dark hair. He looked older than she remembered. Worn, somehow, in a way that had nothing to do with physical exhaustion.
Perhaps you should look more closely, he had said. And now she was looking, and she wasn't entirely certain she liked what she saw.
Not because he was disagreeable. But because he wasn't entirely, not the way she had always believed. There were depths here she had refused to acknowledge, complexities she had dismissed. The villain of her imagination was proving rather more human than she had allowed.
It was deeply inconvenient.
"We should sleep," she said abruptly, pushing back from the table. "The hour grows late, and tomorrow will be difficult regardless of the roads."
Sebastian nodded, rising as well. "I had the innkeeper arrange for a screen. For your privacy."
He gestured toward the corner, where a folding dressing screen had been set up near her bed, providing a barrier between her sleeping area and the rest of the room. It was a thoughtful gesture, the sort of consideration she would not have expected from him.
"Thank you," she said, and this time the words came more easily.
"Of course." He moved toward his own bed, on the far side of the room. "I shall face the wall while you change. You need not worry about your modesty."
"I wasn't worried."
"No, I don't suppose you were. You've never struck me as the worrying type."
"What type have I struck you as?"
Sebastian paused, his back still to her. When he spoke, his voice was strange and quiet, almost thoughtful.
"The type who builds walls," he said. "Very high ones. And defends them fiercely."
Before Harriet could formulate a response, he had disappeared behind his own section of the room, and she was left standing alone with the fire and the uncomfortable feeling that he had seen rather more than she had intended.
CHAPTER TWO
She did not sleep well.
Oh, she tried. She changed into her chemise behind the screen, slipped beneath the covers of her bed, and closed her eyes with every intention of surrendering to exhaustion. But her mind refused to quiet. It kept circling back to the evening's conversation, to Sebastian's unexpected vulnerability, to the way he had spoken about Richard with such obvious grief.
I keep expecting to see him. Isn't that strange?
It wasn't strange at all. Harriet did the same thing, caught glimpses of her brother in crowds, heard echoes of his laugh in strangers' voices, and woke sometimes with the certainty that he was just in the next room, waiting for her to join him for breakfast.
