The corridor was quiet. Mary wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and leaned against the wall beside the nursery door. Inside, Charlotte’s laughter carried through the wood, soft and watery, and William’s murmured voice answered it.
“That was the most generous thing I have ever witnessed,” Mary said. Her voice was unsteady. “France. The university. All of it. You did not have to do any of that.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
Evander did not answer immediately.
Because the boy deserves a father. Because Charlotte deserves a life that is not defined by shame. Because the look on William Harcourt’s face when he offered everything he had was braver than anything I’ve ever done, and the least I could offer in return is the means to make it work.
Because love, despite everything Evander believed about it, had just walked into a nursery and put a family back together, and he could not stand in its way.
“Because it was right,” he ended up saying.
Mary wiped her eyes one more time. She straightened against the wall and looked at him, and the composure she reassembled was thin at the edges but holding.
“I will come to your room tonight.” Her voice was quiet and steady. “For your offer. Since Charlotte and William will want to leave for France as soon as arrangements are made, I imagine you will want to… proceed without delay.”
The words hit Evander in the center of his chest.
He wanted to say no.
He wanted to tell her that she would not be alone. That he was not leaving. That the offer he had made in her bedroom, the cold, measured proposal of a child without love, had been the act of aman so terrified of his own heart that he would rather give Mary a baby than admit he wanted to give her himself.
He wanted to tell her that watching William Harcourt kneel in a nursery with nothing but his own hands and his own courage and offer a woman everything had cracked something open inside Evander that he did not know how to close. That the man with nothing had been braver in thirty seconds than the Duke of Blackholm had been in thirty-one years.
The words rose to the back of his throat and stopped there, pressed against a wall he had spent fourteen years building, and the wall held, because it had always held, because holding was what walls did.
“Tonight, then,” he said.
Mary nodded. She walked toward her room, and her footsteps faded down the corridor.
Evander stood alone outside the nursery where a family he had helped build was learning to hold each other, and the silence around him was not the silence of peace.
It was the silence of a man who had just chosen to be lonely rather than risk ruining everything.
And for the first time in his life, the choice felt like the wrong one.
CHAPTER 28
“You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.”
Mary stood outside Evander’s door in her nightgown and robe, her hair loose around her shoulders, her bare feet cold against the corridor runner, whispering to herself like a woman on the edge of a cliff deciding whether to jump.
The house was silent. Charlotte and William had retired hours ago, Richard was in the guest room, Tommy was asleep in the nursery with Mrs. Bridwell, and every door in the east corridor was shut.
Except for the one Mary was staring at.
She had bathed. She had brushed her hair until it crackled. She had dabbed lavender water behind her ears, which felt ridiculous, and changed into her best nightgown, which felt worse, and stood in front of her mirror for ten minutes rehearsing a composure she did not feel.
This was an arrangement. A transaction. Evander had offered her a child, and she had accepted, and tonight she would walk into his room and they would do what married people did, and in the morning, she would return to her side of the house, and her side of the marriage, and her side of the silence, and in nine months she would have a baby of her own, and Evander would have fulfilled his obligation, and everything would be exactly as he had proposed.
Her hand trembled on the door handle.
She knocked.
“Come in.”
