About us, is what he wants to say. Again, it always comes back to the same.
“I will not tell you that tonight means nothing,” she said, standing tall, firming her voice. “And yes, people will likely talk. But where you choose to see the bad, I prefer to focus on the good.”
She looked at him, waiting for him to ask the obvious question. Typically, most predictably, he did no such thing.
“You did as you promised that you would do, Adrian,” she started, her voice trembling. “You protected me. Now, you might not see the good in that, but I do. All I hope is that you come to understand what that means, that…” Her voice wavered again. “That caring about what I think is far more important than what others do.”
Adrian said nothing, still facing away from her, his body still tense and rigid. She watched him, looking for any sign that her words landed as she needed them to do. But his walls were back up, and she doubted he cared at all.
“Tomorrow,” he said finally, his voice so low that she hardly heard it. “We will speak of this tomorrow.” With that, he started up the stairs.
Ophelia watched him go, thinking again to call out and tell him that he did not have to worry about what had happened, that it did not matter! How they felt about one another was all that needed to be focused on; that was where happiness would be found.
She kept those words to herself, knowing they would fall on deaf ears.
Once again, Ophelia was left alone, lamenting what might have been, while suffering under the weight of a situation she knew only too well, and one that she might never escape from.
CHAPTER 26
Adrian sat in his office and stared at the painting that hung on the back wall. It was a family portrait, commissioned shortly after his tenth birthday. The portrait featured Adrian as a boy, sitting between his mother and his father. No smiles. No sense of warmth or love. It was as cold as his parents’ marriage had been, a stark reminder of what had made Adrian into the man he was destined to become.
He could still remember the day that he sat for that portrait.
He had woken to the sound of fighting, his mother and father’s angered words stirring him from his sleep. It had been a common occurrence by that point in his life, so often heard that he thought it was normal.
As was always the case, his mother won the argument. Although Adrian had loved his father, the man was weak, blinded by love, and never able to stand up for himself as he ought to have done. Because he was so young, Adrian thought such thingswere normal, that marriages were meant to be that way. Yes, his father was weak, but he loved his wife, and that was what mattered.
It was the following day when Adrian’s mother left.
As he came to learn, she’d been having an affair, one that Adrian’s father knew of, just as he’d been unable and unwilling to stop. He must have assumed that if he bowed to her, if he proved how much he loved her, that she would stay… that it might somehow make them stronger.
The effect of her leaving was where Adrian’s mind drifted next. The entiretonfound out quickly, and they were just as quick to blame Adrian’s father. It was his fault; he must have done something wrong, and he was not strong enough to keep her by his side.
He was right to let her go… but he wasn’t right to accept the gossip that came, to let it shape who he turned into. For that, I will never forgive him.
The gossip broke Adrian’s father. It turned him into a sniveling coward, depressed and alone, just as he was unwilling to fight back and tell the real story of what happened. He took the scandal so that his wife would be saved from shame, and from that state of despair, he never truly recovered.
So it was that Adrian made a decision, one that he had stuck firmly to until a knock on his door in the middle of the night changed everything.
For all his life, Adrian determined that he would never be involved in a scandal like that which ruined his father. To do so, he locked himself away, became forgotten, and ignored the early rumors about why, because he knew they would eventually die off. It had been a lonely life, but it had been his, and while he was never truly happy, his reputation remained intact.
Or it had done… it might have been… but I am as weak as my father.
Adrian continued to look at his family’s portrait, alone in his office, his mind casting back to the previous few weeks. Oh, how he had tried to avoid Ophelia. Oh, how he had wanted to cut her out and make it known that he wished for nothing to do with her.
It wasn’t done because he hated her. In fact, it was the opposite. In Ophelia, Adrian saw signs of his own father, the pitiful weakness of a man who was happy to put his name on the line, to risk everything, on the off chance that it might lead to something more… to happiness…
And it almost had. For a short time, Adrian had dared to dream. Ophelia was kind, she was caring, she was a light in the dark, and he walked toward it even though he knew he should turn back and run. He wanted what she offered, just as the voices in the back of his mind cried out for him to stop and think and do as he had to do.
Those voices spoke louder than ever. And while Adrian wanted to ignore them, he knew too that it was about time he listened.
“Your Grace…” The door opened, and Mr. Watley peered his head inside. “Are you busy?”
“I am, Mr. Watley,” he said without turning around.
“It is Her Grace,” Mr. Watley continued. “She is asking after you. She wishes to know if you will be joining her for breakfast.”
He wanted to… more than anything… to walk downstairs, to confirm with Ophelia his feelings so that she would know them… the fire inside of Adrian that was his passion and his adoration for her roared to life, begging that he act. If there was any chance that he might one day be happy, now was the time.
