“Yes.” A pause. “It does.”
William knew he was simply rambling and avoiding the very thing he should be saying. He couldn’t stop another audible exhale.
James looked at him over the rim of his glass. “William, did something else happen after the ball?”
William looked at the fire. “We went into the garden.”
James was very still.
“Away from the terrace. A quiet corner, the two of us.” William said it without embellishment. “And I… kissed her.”
The room was quiet.
“Right,” James uttered.
“She kissed me back, in case you were wondering.”
“I was.” He set down his glass and gave William a bored look. “And this morning you came to my house looking like that?”
“I could hardly sleep a wink. I could not–” William paused. “I sat in my study for three hours and read the same document approximately nine times and took in nothing, and then I sent you a note because I needed to say it out loud to someone who was not going to repeat it.”
“You kissed your wife at a ball and spent the next morning in your study,” James said flatly. “Most men would consider that a solved problem.”
“Most men,” William retorted, “did not watch their parents destroy everything they had built and everyone who lived inside it.”
James said nothing for a moment. He looked at William with the level attention of someone who had known a person since they were twelve years old and had been holding this piece of information for most of that time, waiting for the moment to use it.
“Do you remember,” William asked, “the summer we were twelve, and you came to Blackmoor for a fortnight?”
James nodded. “Yes.”
“You asked me once why I slept in the east wing, when my rooms were in the west wing. I told you it was quieter.”
“I remember.”
“It was not quieter.” William looked at the fire. “The east wing was farther from my parents’ rooms. When they argued that the east wing was the only place in the house where you couldn’t hear it clearly. Where it became just… noise. Far enough away to be almost unreal.”
He looked at the window. Rain was starting to patter against the glass pane.
“My father was a man who felt everything immediately and examined none of it.” He did not say it as a question. He was thinking out loud, which he rarely did—which was in itself information, and James was well aware of that. “Whatever hewanted in a given moment, he pursued without considering the cost until the cost had already been paid. By everyone else.”
“He loved my mother.” He said it flatly, the way he said things he had thought about for so long, they had become bare fact. “Completely. Exclusively. By all accounts, she was the only person who had ever genuinely held his attention, and he hers. They married within a year. Everyone who attended the wedding said they had never seen two people more certain of each other.
“By the time I was eight, the house was a thing you learned to listen to before you moved through it. You learned which silence was safe and which was the kind that preceded noise. You learned which doors to close and which staircases to avoid.” He looked at the fire. “Isadora used to read with her fingers in her ears. She told me once she thought it was simply what reading required. She was six, James.Six.”
“I know,” James said, very quietly.
William shook his head. “They loved each other, James. That is what I cannot—they had not started with indifference. They had started witheverything. And it became what it became gradually enough that by the end, neither of them could have told you where the line was.”
“And you have spent ten years making sure you never crossed it,” James said.
“You’ve seen me. I have spent ten years making sure I never found it.”
“William, you–”
“They had argued that morning,” William spoke over him. “Badly. I know because I heard it through three walls and the east wing. They eventually went out that afternoon.” He looked at the fire. “They did not speak before they left. The last thing that passed between them was an argument that I still know the shape of because it sounded like every argument before it. I was in my rooms, thinking that by dinner it would be done, they would have cooled, and then–” He swallowed thickly.
“And then they didn’t,” James murmured.
