Rowan descended with exhaustion heavy in every limb.
Frederick stood in the entrance hall with flowers in one hand, his cravat tied with unusual care, and his face drawn with worry. He looked absurdly formal for dawn, and worse, he looked stripped of all the careless ease Rowan had known for nearly twenty years.
“Juliet sent word,” Frederick said, lifting the flowers a little, though the gesture died halfway, awkward in a way he never was. His gaze flicked once toward the stairs. “I brought these for Emmeline. I thought… I do not know what I thought.”
Rowan stared at him.
Old anger stirred at the sight of him standing in his house, carrying flowers for the woman whose distress he had helped cause. But the anger had no strength beside the cold, enormous terror lodged inside Rowan’s chest.
“Come to the parlor,” Rowan said.
Frederick’s brows lifted slightly, as though he had expected to be ordered from the house instead. Then he nodded once and followed.
Inside, with the door closed, Frederick set the flowers carefully on a side table. His hand lingered on the stems for a moment too long before he turned, and when he looked at Rowan properly, there was no smile ready, no cleverness waiting behind his eyes.
“How is she?” he asked, his voice lower now.
“Asleep,” Rowan said. “The physician is coming.”
Frederick exhaled, his shoulders dropping with a relief that seemed to leave him unsteady. “Good.” He dragged a hand over his mouth and nodded again, more to himself than to Rowan. “That is good.”
Silence stretched between them and, for once, Frederick did not try to fill it.
Then he looked up, his expression tight with something Rowan had rarely seen on him without irony: shame.
“I am sorry,” Frederick said quietly.
Rowan’s jaw flexed. “For which part?”
Frederick accepted the blow without flinching, though his mouth tightened. “All of it.”
Rowan said nothing.
“I should have told you,” Frederick continued. He stood very still now, his hands at his sides, fingers curling once before he forced them open again. “I believed I was protecting her. But I also lied to you. I watched you search. I watched Aaron ask after her. I let you look me in the face and trust me while I kept the truth.” His throat worked. “I made you suffer, and for that, Rowan, I am sorry.”
Rowan had no wish to forgive him yet. Perhaps not entirely. But he was too exhausted and too frightened for Emmeline to pretend this wound was the only one that mattered.
“You chose her instead of me,” he said, and heard, too late, the hurt beneath the accusation. “Why?”
Frederick’s face changed. The last of his practiced charm fell away, leaving him pale and plainly afraid.
“Because I love her.”
For a moment, the words seemed to belong to a language Rowan could not speak.
Rowan stared at him. “You love… Juliet?”
“Yes,” Frederick said. His eyes did not move from Rowan’s, but color rose faintly along his cheekbones. “Juliet.”
“You hid my sister in various lodgings for weeks,” Rowan said slowly, trying to make the facts fit the man before him. “You risked scandal, lied to me, let me tear half the county apart looking for her, and you are only now telling me this?”
Frederick gave a short, humorless laugh, but there was pain in it. “I assure you, I did not plan to fall in love. And I was occupied with making a wreck of my life. I did not have the leisure to announce it elegantly.”
Despite himself, Rowan almost heard the old Frederick beneath it.
“I know this is terrible timing… But I intend to marry her,” Frederick said, more steadily now. “If she will have me. And if she does, I would ask your blessing.”
Rowan’s first instinct was refusal. Violent, immediate, paternal in a way Juliet would have hated.
