He had been a fool.
This helpless devotion was worse. This need to put himself between her and suffering, when there was no enemy to fight and nothing to command except servants, physicians, water and cloth.
“Please,” he whispered, so low no one could have heard. “Do not leave me with what I said.”
At last, near dawn, Emmeline slept. Rowan remained where he was, one hand still covering hers.
The door opened with the smallest creak, and Aaron slipped in. Rowan looked up. The boy froze as though caught trespassing, one hand on the doorframe, Biscuit pressed against his legs.
“She is asleep,” Rowan said quietly.
Aaron nodded. He took two steps inside, then stopped. “Can I see?”
Rowan rose carefully and went to him, guiding him back into the corridor before the boy could look too long at Emmeline’s drained face and build nightmares from it.
In the hall, Aaron’s composure failed.
“Is she going to die like Mama?”
The question was so small that Rowan felt something in him rip open.
He crouched in front of his son. For once, he did not think of dignity or authority. Emmeline had taught him better than that. He took Aaron by both shoulders, careful but firm.
“No,” he said. “She will not.”
“You d-do not know.”
The stammer returned, faint but there, pulled from him by fear. Rowan hated himself for every time he had thought of it as something to be managed rather than understood.
“The physician is coming,” Rowan said. “He will examine her, and we will do whatever he tells us. She is strong.”
Aaron’s mouth trembled. “I love her.”
“I know.”
“No,” Aaron insisted, urgent now, and the stammer vanished beneath the force of feeling. “I really love her. She listens when I speak, even if I take too long. She let Biscuit stay. She reads voices in stories. And Father, you smiled more after she came.”
Rowan went still.
Aaron did not seem to notice. He was looking toward the chamber door, his eyes wet and fierce. “The house was better. You were better. I was not scared all the time. I do not want it to go back.”
Rowan heard the words quietly at first, and then their meaning broke open inside him.
He looked at his son and realized, with a shock that left him almost breathless, that Aaron had spoken nearly all of it clearly. No stumbling or shrinking. Emmeline had done that, with warmth and patience and that impossible softness Rowan had mistaken for fragility when it had been strength all along.
She had changed his son for the better. She had changed his house. She had changed him. And he had punished her for showing mercy in a way he had never been taught.
Rowan drew Aaron close, and the boy came into his arms stiffly at first, then all at once. Small hands gripped his shirt. Rowan held him, stunned by how little he had understood the weight of this child’s fear until Emmeline had taught him how to see it.
“She will not leave us,” Rowan said, though he did not know how he would keep that promise. “I swear it.”
Footsteps sounded below before Aaron could answer.
A few minutes later, a servant came up. “Your Grace, Lord Calham is here.”
Rowan’s arms tightened once around Aaron before he released him. “Take Biscuit to your aunt. Wait with her.”
Aaron wiped his face and nodded.
