“Some things are better left buried.”
“Are they?” She gestured to the portrait. “Is that what you’ve been doing these past three days? Burying it? Or finally confronting what you’ve spent seventeen years running from?”
Theodore said nothing. The accusation landed too close to the truth.
“Tell me about Charles,” Lady Seymore said quietly. “Not the version you’ve constructed in your guilt and shame, but the actual man.”
“I’ve told you?—”
“You’ve told me the facts. The affair, the duel, your father’s death. But you’ve never spoken about what it felt like to discover that someone you loved had betrayed you.”
Theodore’s hands clenched against the arms of his chair. “It felt like everything I believed about people—about trust, about loyalty—was a lie. Charles was the one person besides you who’d treated me as though I mattered. And he used that affection to manipulate me into silence while he destroyed our family.”
“He did,” Lady Seymore agreed. “And that was unconscionable. But Theodore, my dear boy, you must understand something crucial.” She leaned forward, her expression intent. “What Charles did—what your mother did—those were their choices. Their moral failures. Not yours. You were seventeen years old, confronted with an impossible situation created by adults who should have protected you instead of using you.” Her voice softened without losing its firmness. “You did nothing wrong.”
“Your father might have challenged Charles anyway. You know his temperament as well as I do. He wasn’t a man who tolerated betrayal with quiet divorces and discreet separations.” Lady Seymore held his gaze. “The duel might have happened regardless of when you spoke. Or it might have happened sooner and ended in the same tragedy. You cannot know, Theodore. And you must stop punishing yourself for variables you could never control.”
Theodore stared at Charles’s painted face. The warmth in those eyes, the charm that had fooled everyone. He’d spent so many years convinced that his attachment to his uncle had blinded him, that caring about people inevitably led to devastation.
But now… Now things were different.
“I know,” he said. “I can see that now.”
Charles had been weak. Whatever affection he’d held for Theodore, it had not been worth keeping his honor. A man willing to betray his brother, manipulate his nephew, destroy his family—that wasn’t love corrupted by passion. That was simply a lack of character dressed up in charisma and charm.
“She didn’t do anything wrong,” Theodore heard himself say. “Cressida. She was simply curious about a covered portrait in her own home. And I…” He closed his eyes. “I saw her reaching for what I’d hidden, and I panicked. Because letting her see Charles felt like letting her see every failure, every mistake, every reason I’m fundamentally incapable of being the husband she deserves.”
“Oh, Theodore.” Lady Seymore’s voice carried such tenderness that it made his throat thicken. “You’re not incapable of anything except honesty. With her and with yourself.”
“I don’t know how to be what she needs.”
“She doesn’t need you to be perfect. She needs you to stop hiding behind walls you built when you were too young to know there were other ways to protect yourself.” She stood and leaned down to place one hand over his. “Do you love her?”
He missed her voice at breakfast. Her opinions on estate matters that she’d researched without being asked. The way she’d argued with him about tenant improvements, passionate and informed and entirely unbending when she believed she was right. Hemissed the warmth of her beside him at night, the sound of her breathing in the dark, the way she’d reach for him without waking.
He missed the way she’d looked at him sometimes, when she had thought he hadn’t been paying attention. As though he was someone worth knowing, despite all evidence to the contrary.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “God help me, yes.”
Lady Seymore’s expression softened with something that might have been relief. “Then you need to tell her that. Not in some grand gesture designed to avoid actual vulnerability, but honestly. Completely. In a way that makes it clear you understand what you’ve done and what you’re asking of her.”
“She won’t forgive me.”
“Perhaps not immediately, but Cressida strikes me as someone capable of extraordinary grace when given genuine cause.” She squeezed his hand. “The question is whether you’re brave enough to give her that cause.”
Theodore looked at Charles’s portrait one final time. For seventeen years, he’d let this man’s choices define his own. Seventeen years of walls and distance and careful control, all designed to prevent the kind of devastation that had destroyed his family.
But in protecting himself from potential pain, he’d guaranteed a different kind of destruction. The slow erosion of everything that made life worth living, until he was nothing but duty and isolation and the hollow performance of existence.
Cressida had offered him something different. Had pushed past his defenses with her curiosity and her arguments and her stubborn refusal to accept his coldness as an immutable fact. Had made him want things he’d sworn never to want again—connection, intimacy, the terrifying vulnerability of being known.
And when confronted with that vulnerability, when she’d touched something he’d kept hidden for nearly two decades, he’d lashed out with the cruelest words he could conjure. Had reduced their entire marriage to a transaction because facing his own capacity for feeling was more frightening than any external threat.
“What your parents and Charles did was not your fault, Theodore,” Lady Seymore said softly. “But what you do next, whether you let their failures define your future or choose something better, that is entirely up to you now.”
Theodore stood abruptly. “I need to go to Cressida.”
“Yes, you do.” His aunt’s smile held approval. “Though perhaps you should bathe first. And change your clothes. You look like you’ve been sleeping in your study.”
