“Let me finish. Please. Because if I stop, I may not be able to start again.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded.
He drew a breath. It shook.
“You asked me to let you in. You asked me to be honest with you, to tell you about Sebastian and my father and the deficiency Lord Sudberry mentioned, but I refused. I shut the door and told you to leave and convinced myself it was for your protection, when the truth is that it was for mine. I was protecting myself,Lily. From you. From the possibility that if you saw what lives behind the mask, you would look at me the way people have looked at me my entire life. With pity. With discomfort. With the particular, careful kindness that people reserve for things they consider broken.”
His voice caught. Not on a word. On the breath before the word, the gathering of air that precedes speech, Lily saw his jaw tighten and his throat work and the effort it cost him to push through.
“I had a stammer. Well, I still have it, in some ways.”
The words fought him. She watched it happen, watched the consonant catch, hold, and then release. The sound of it, fractured and imperfect, was so far from the polished fluency she had come to associate with Hugo Beaumont that it took her a moment to understand what she had heard.
“I have had it since I was a boy. It b-began after my mother died. She took her own life, Lily. When I was eight. And something in my voice broke after that. The words that had always come easily began to stick, and no amount of practice or willpower could make them smooth again.”
His hands hung at his sides. They were trembling. He did not try to hide it.
“Sebastian was my older brother, as you know. He was everything my father wanted: strong, confident, fluent. I was the spare. The boy who could not get through a sentence without stumbling. My father called it a deficiency. Sebastian called itworse.” Hugo’s gaze dropped to the grass. “One night, when I was seventeen, Sebastian brought a woman home. She heard me and laughed. She asked Sebastian if I was his invalid brother. Sebastian threw me to the floor and told me that our mother had ended her life because she was ashamed of me.”
“Hugo.” She stepped toward him, her hand reaching for his arm. He flinched, and she stopped, her fingers hovering an inch from his sleeve. She did not withdraw them. She held them there, steady and open, an offering he could take or refuse.
“You do not have to finish,” she said. “Not if it hurts too much.”
“It all hurts.” He looked at her outstretched hand. He did not take it. But he did not step away. “Let me finish. I must.”
Hugo took a deep breath and continued. “My father heard the commotion. He came out of his study and saw me on the floor, crying, and he did not help me up. He asked Sebastian what I had done wrong. And then he told me to wipe my face and stop sniveling like a peasant.”
“Sebastian died three years later. A riding accident. He was thrown from a horse during a hunt, and he did not survive the fall.” Hugo’s voice flattened. “My father never recovered. He died the following year, and I inherited a title that was never meant for me, from a family that had never wanted me to have it.”
The wind moved through the grass. A gull cried somewhere over the cliffs. Hugo stood on the roadside with mud on his boots andtears he was fighting not to shed with the truth of his entire life laid bare between them.
“That night, I sat in my room and practiced saying my own name until it came out whole. I practiced every day for years. I built the voice you know, the charm, the ease, the man who can command a ballroom without a single crack showing. I built him to survive. And I have been so afraid of anyone seeing through the construction that I pushed away the one person who ever made me want to stop building.”
He looked up. His eyes were bright and red-rimmed, and his voice came out rough and unsteady and nothing at all like the voice of a Duke.
“That is the truth. That is what lives behind the door I would not open. A boy with a broken voice who was told he was not worth saving, and who has spent fifteen years trying to prove them wrong.”
Lily’s vision blurred. She blinked hard. The tears fell anyway.
“I wish you had told me sooner,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Hearing this does not make me think less of you, Hugo.” She stepped closer. “If anything, it explains everything. Why you fight so hard to stay composed. Why you fear being seen without armor. Why you hold everyone at a distance.” She reached upand pressed her palm against his cheek, against the scratch, against the skin that was warm and rough with stubble. “I would have accepted all of this. Every version of you. As long as it was real.”
“I know that now.” His voice broke. “I know that because you… Besides Edward, you are the only person who has ever looked at me and seen past the performance without flinching. You saw me stammer in the study that night, and you did not recoil. You did not laugh. And I sent you away because I could not bear to be seen that way, and it was the cruelest, most cowardly thing I have ever done.”
“It was.”
“I know.”
“It was also the most frightened I have ever seen you.”
He closed his eyes. Her hand remained on his cheek.
“I am s-sorry.” The stammer surfaced again, and this time, he did not try to conceal it. He let it come. He let her hear it. “I am sorry for hurting you. For pushing you away. For every morning I spent in that study instead of beside you, convincing myself that you deserved better, when the truth is that you deserved honesty and I was too afraid to give it.”
He opened his eyes.
