“No. But you lived it.”
That silenced him.
For a moment, he looked at her as though she had placed a hand directly over some wound and somehow found it through cloth and bone.
“She grew worse,” he said, quieter. “There were days when she seemed herself. Then hours when she did not know me. She would clutch Aaron and say no one could have him. She would scream if anyone came too near.”
Emmeline felt cold despite the candlelight. “Is that why Aaron is afraid of the river?”
His hand flexed against his thigh.
“She took him there.” The words were almost too soft to hear.
Emmeline’s breath stopped.
“It was winter,” he said. “Cold enough that the edges had iced over. I had been away from the nursery for perhaps ten minutes. Less. I heard shouting. By the time I reached the grounds, she was near the river with Aaron in her arms.”
He stopped.
Emmeline’s eyes burned, but she held herself still because he was speaking as though each word had to be pulled from him by force.
“She thought someone was coming for him,” Rowan said. “I do not know who. There was no one. Only servants behind me, frightened out of their wits. I tried to speak to her. Tried to make her look at me. She kept stepping backward.”
“Rowan,” Emmeline whispered.
His face did not change, but his eyes had gone hollow.
“The ice broke beneath her. She fell. Aaron…” His breath caught for the first time. “Aaron went under with her.”
Emmeline’s hand flew to her mouth.
“I reached him first,” Rowan said. “I remember that. I remember his shawl in the water. I remember pulling him out. He was so small. So quiet for one terrible moment that I thought?—”
He cut himself off.
Emmeline reached for him then. Her hand closed over his cold fingers.
“She died?” Emmeline asked, though she already knew.
“Not in the water,” he said. “From the fever afterward. I do not know what name the physicians gave it. I stopped listening after a while. She never truly understood what had happened.”
His hand turned beneath hers, no longer pulling away.
“Aaron remembers the fear,” Emmeline said softly. “Not her. But the fear.”
Rowan’s jaw tightened. “I failed them both.”
“No.”
His head turned sharply.
“No,” she said again, firmer now. “You did not create her illness. You did not make the ice break. You saved your son.”
“I saved his body,” Rowan said, and the bitterness in his voice cut through her. “Then I spent years teaching him that safety meant silence.”
Emmeline’s throat tightened.
There it was. The truth beneath every harsh word, every rigid command, every time he reached for Aaron too late and too awkwardly.
