He did not answer. Annabelle pulled the chair from in front of his desk and sat down. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.
“I have spent two years traveling,” she said, her voice quieter now. “I asked you to delay my debut, and you granted that wish to me. Like you always have. And throughout these two years I’ve been nothing but grateful to you. But you must know that before I left, I could not bear to watch you perform for the ton, night after night, wearing that smile that never reached your eyes. I left because watching my brother pretend to be happy was worse than missing him.”
Lucien’s hand tightened on the glass.
“And then I came home,” Annabelle continued, “and you were different. You smiled at Elinor, and the smile was real. You wrote me four pages about a constellation lesson. You named an orphanage after something she taught children. You sat on the floor with those children, Lucien. On thefloor.You, the man who would not loosen his cravat at a family dinner, sat cross-legged among orphans and took notes on a slate.”
“Annabelle.”
“She changed you. She brought you back. And now you are sitting in this study with a bottle of brandy, telling me that the decision was mutual, and I do not believe you.” Her eyes glistened. “I do not believe you for one second.”
The silence stretched. The clock on the mantel ticked. The fire had burned low, because Lucien had not called for it to be stoked, had not called for anything since he locked himself in the study three hours ago with the decanter and Georgie’s drawing, which sat unfolded on the desk between them.
Annabelle’s gaze dropped to it. The woman with spectacles. The tall man on the floor. The stars across the top.Lyra.
“You kept this,” she whispered.
“It is a child’s drawing.”
“It is a picture of your life, Lucien. The life you had with her. And you are sitting here drinking yourself into oblivion instead of fighting for it.”
He set the glass down. The sound was too loud in the quiet room.
“You do not understand,” he said, and his voice came out rougher than he intended, the edges frayed by brandy and grief. “I am not good for her. I have never been good for anyone. I takewhat people offer me, and I ruin it, and she deserves better than a man who cannot?—”
He stopped. The rest caught in his throat, and he pressed the heel of his hand to his eye, hard enough to see sparks. Anything to keep his sister from seeing what he had hidden since Vivian and Henry vanished.
Annabelle rose and came around the desk. Before he could compose himself, she wrapped her arms around him and held him as she had when they were children, when their uncle’s cruelty left marks he could not show and she sat beside him in the dark, forehead to his, promising she was there.
He did not return the embrace. His hands stayed flat on the desk, his body rigid. If he softened, he would break, and he did not know if he could be made whole again.
“You have been running from this since we were children, Lucien. Since Uncle Edgar told you that caring for people was a weakness and then spent ten years proving it by making us suffer for every scrap of affection we showed each other. You watched what he did to anyone who loved him, and you decided the safest course was to become a man who loved no one.”
Lucien refused to look at her. Knew what it would cost him to acknowledge the truth of her words.
“You are not him,” Annabelle said against his shoulder. “Not Uncle Edgar. Not the man Vivian made you believe you were. You are the man who gave children a home and named it afterthe stars. The man who fell in love with a woman who wears spectacles and argues with earls.”
“Annabelle.” His voice broke on her name.
“You are my brother.” She held him tighter. “And your heart is full, Lucien. It always has been. You only built walls high enough to forget what it felt like to let someone in.”
He closed his eyes. His sister’s arms were around him, the drawing lay on the desk, the brandy caught the firelight, and somewhere across London a woman was crying into a pillow with a tabby pressed to her side.
He knew she was crying, as surely as he knew the stars still burned beyond the clouds.
Annabelle drew back and searched his face. Whatever she saw brought tears to her own.
“You love her,” she said.
Lucien looked at the drawing. The woman with the spectacles. The man on the floor. The stars.
“Yes,” he said.
The word left his mouth for the first time, spoken aloud, to the one person in his life who had never left, and it tore through himlike something that had been locked in a cage and was now loose and wild and impossible to contain.
Annabelle cupped his face in her hands. “Then why are you here?”
He had no answer. Or rather, he had one, and it was made of fear and old wounds and the memory of a letter that had taught him that love was something people used to leave, and the answer shamed him so deeply that he could not give it voice.
