Like the universe itself paused.
Lucas pressed a hand over his heart. “I need a whisky.”
When Noah finally spoke, his voice was low, almost calm, but I could hear the emotion beneath it.
“For all of these years … the Estate, Langston Estate, belonged to my family. To my father. To me.”
Lady Beaumont’s eyes met his.
“Yes.”
“And now,” he whispered, “everything is different.”
The steadiness in him, even now, broke something in me.
Noah had poured years of grief, loyalty, and love into this place. He had walked every inch of the land with reverence.
This place was his heart.
And now the ground had moved beneath him.
Sophie shook her head frantically. “Noah, I didn’t ask for this. It’s too much…”
“It’s not about want,” Noah said briskly. “It’s about truth.”
His hands curled into fists at his sides.
“Truth,” he repeated, the word like a sharp stone in his mouth. “Something everyone else seemed to know except me.”
“That’s not fair,” Lady Beaumont said painfully.
He turned slowly towards her. “Isn’t it?”
She bowed her head.
Finally, Noah asked the question I had felt building in him from the moment James said the word ‘questions’.
“Why didn’t Edward leave a will?”
Lady Beaumont closed her eyes. “I don’t know.” Her voice cracked.
“It is something I have been hopeful of finding these past few days,” she confessed. “Desperately. Hoping to find some written clarity. A confession. A statement of intent. But Edward… he kept too much. He wrote things by hand. On scraps. In notebooks. In old drawers. So much that it has been hard to go through it all.”
Noah stared at her. “You think he hid it?”
“I think,” she whispered, “he wrote one. I think he meant to tell you. I think he meant to put things right. But life…” Her throat bobbed. “Life took him too soon.”
Noah stood rigid, staring at the vineyards through the window as if they were suddenly foreign soil.
I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I stepped closer, just enough for him to feel me. Slowly, I reached out and laid a hand on his arm.
He didn’t look at me, but his muscles loosened under my touch, the smallest sign of surrender.
Lady Beaumont’s gaze dropped to where my hand rested on him.
“Well, now you know everything,” she said.
