The obedience of it struck Rowan harder than tears would have done.
Emmeline set her glass down carefully and cleared her throat.
“Aaron,” she said gently, leaning forward just a little, “it is perfectly all right to feel sad.”
Rowan’s gaze cut to her. Her eyes remained on the boy, but he heard the challenge in the words. Aaron looked between them, uncertain.
“You may miss someone, even if you do not remember them clearly.” Emmeline’s voice softened further. “Sometimes what we miss is not a picture. Sometimes it is only the place where the person ought to have been.”
Rowan felt the old cold begin to rise as images flashed before his eyes. The river air. The shawl around Aaron’s little body. Catherine’s wild, terrified face as she stepped backward over the ice, whispering that they would not take him, they would not take him, no one would take her boy.
He remembered the sound of Aaron crying, high and broken, and the crack beneath her foot that had turned the whole world white.
“You think tenderness solves everything,” Rowan said, his voice dropping until he scarcely recognized it as his own. “You think because you can coax him into smiling that the rest of it is simple.”
Emmeline’s lips parted.
“Rowan,” she whispered.
The sound of his name from her mouth should have pulled him back. Instead, it pressed against something already brewing inside him.
“You do not know what this house has endured,” he said. “You do not know what happens when softness cannot be enough.”
Her throat moved once. “I am not saying it is enough.”
“No?” He stood then, the chair scraping harshly behind him. “Then what is this? Another correction? Another lesson in how I ought to speak, how I ought to mourn, how I ought to father my own son?”
Color drained from her face.
Aaron whispered, “F-father.”
Rowan heard him, and the small, shaken sound of it should have stopped him. But Catherine’s memory was too close now.
The river. The ice. Aaron crying in his mother’s arms. The months of fever after. The silence that had followed.
All of it crowded the dining room until he could hardly breathe around it.
His gaze remained on Emmeline because if he looked at his son, he might see what he was doing.
“There are limits, Emmeline,” he said, each word rougher than the last. “You cannot come into this house and mend everything by wishing it so.”
Emmeline went very still.
“I know that,” she said softly.
But he was too far inside the old fear to stop himself.
“Then stop pressing where you do not understand.”
Emmeline went very still.
Her lips remained parted around whatever answer had died before it reached them. Her hand lay beside the napkin, pale against the white linen, and for one second her fingers pressed down so hard the fabric creased beneath them.
Then, slowly, she let go. She lowered her lashes, drew one quiet breath through her nose, and smoothed the napkin once with the tips of her fingers.
Rowan’s own mouth went dry. He looked at the small crease left in the linen where her hand had been and felt, too late, the impact of what he had done. In that instant, he would have given anything to pull the words back into his own mouth and choke on them.
Aaron stared at him, stricken.
