He looked older. Six months older, or six years. The boyishness that had always defined him, the easy smile, the open warmth Mrs. Cahill had described, was gone, replaced by something more guarded. More careful.
More like Evander.
A chill went down his spine at the realization.
As the night pressed in around them, and the cottage light spilled across the threshold, Evander felt the relief and the anger arrive at the same time, tangled together so tightly he could not separate them.
Richard’s eyes moved from Evander to Quentin, standing by the carriage, then back.
“Give me a moment,” Richard said, this time lower than before. “I’ll pack my things.”
He disappeared inside. Evander stood on the doorstep and listened to the sounds of drawers opening and closing, a bag being packed, the small mechanical noises of a man dismantling a hiding place he had lived in for six months. Quentin walked up and stood beside him without speaking.
Richard emerged ten minutes later with a leather bag over his shoulder. He locked the cottage door, pocketed the key, and followed them to the carriage.
They rode in silence for the first mile. Richard sat opposite Evander, his bag on the seat beside him, his hands clasped between his knees. He looked at the floor of the carriage. Then at Evander.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t.” Evander’s voice was controlled but thin at the edges. “I am not the only person who deserves that apology, so you had better save it until we reach London. You will need everyone.”
Richard flinched. He looked down at his hands. “How did you find me?” he asked after a moment.
“Lucrezia.”
Richard’s head came up. A raw, unguarded light moved across his face at the sound of her name, the kind of emotion Evander had spent his life training himself not to show. His brother’s eyes brightened, his voice changed, and the question that followed carried the weight of a man asking about the only thing that mattered.
“Was she well?”
Evander studied his brother’s face. The brightness in his eyes. The way his hands had stilled at the mention of her name, the restless guilt replaced by something steadier.
Whatever Lucrezia Fierro was to Richard, whatever their story held, the feeling was real. Because he knew his brother, and what Evander saw in Richard… it was all pure and very, very real.
“She was well,” Evander confirmed. “She asked me to bring you home.”
Richard pressed his lips together and nodded, and his eyes shone in the carriage lamplight, and he looked out the window at the dark countryside passing, and he did not speak again for a long time.
Quentin cleared his throat. “Well. This has been a tremendously enjoyable evening. Coffeehouses, opera singers, mysterious cottages. I feel like a character in a novel.”
Evander didn’t respond, and neither did Richard.
Quentin settled back in his seat and folded his arms. “I liked it better when you were both talking to me individually,” he muttered. “The brooding coming from both of you is oppressive.”
The carriage rolled on through the Sussex night, carrying three men back toward London, toward a baby in a crib, toward a wife who did not yet know that the story she had believed since the day she walked into Evander’s parlor was about to change entirely.
Evander looked at his brother’s face in the lamplight and saw what Lucrezia had told him to look for.
He is more like you than you expect.
CHAPTER 22
“Your Grace, shall I bring fresh tea?”
Mary shook her head without looking at Harding.
The butler hovered in the parlor doorway, patient and unsurprised, clearly accustomed to the hours this household kept.
“That will be all, Harding. Go to bed.”
