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Hudson did not answer, picking up one of the unused glasses in the tray. He half-filled it with scotch and drank it all at once, refilling his glass again and repeating the action. He cast another look at the door his brother had disappeared through, turning Cornelius’ words over and over in his mind, feeling as though they still cut deeper, even though it had been a while since they had stabbed him.

“For what it is worth,” Owen added when Hudson said nothing, “I did not tell him you were coming because I suspected, quite rightly, as it turns out, that he would not have come himself if he had known. Someone needed to force the two of you into a room together before you both grew old and disagreeable, arguing through letters and second-hand gossip instead. I am surprised you agreed to face him after all. What happened to ‘waiting until he comes to his senses’?”

“Your meddling efforts are duly noted,” Hudson said flatly. “But it was my wife that pointed out that it was necessary to speak with him soon, lest the sour feelings fester. She put it a lot more eloquently than you ever had.”

“My feelings are quite hurt, Hudson. Besides, I prefer to think of it less as meddling, but more so as diplomacy. I was more concerned that you would get struck across the face – and yet you were not,” Owen pointed out, seeming entirely too pleased with himself. “I call that a successful evening, all things considered. Besides, I have known you both long enough to recognize that this particular wound needed lancing before it could ever properly heal. Better it happen here, among friends, than at some ball with half the ton looking on.”

“Your logic is sound, however irritating the delivery,” Hudson admitted grudgingly.

“I shall accept that as high praise, coming from you.”

Hudson did not dignify that with a response, though the corner of his mouth twitched despite himself, some small, familiar comfort in the absurdity of his friend even amid the wreckage of the evening.

“He does not mean all of it,” Owen offered, more gently now, abandoning his attempt at humor. “He is angry, Hudson. Angry men say cruel things they do not fully believe.”

“Perhaps,” Hudson allowed. “But even the cruelest things a man says in anger tend to carry some grain of truth within them. That is rather what troubles me most. I have spent years believing my own account of myself – dutiful, protective, willing to sacrifice my own comfort for the sake of those I love. I did not expect to hear that account challenged so thoroughly, nor to find myself so unable to properly defend it.”

Owen was quiet for a moment, watching his friend with unusual seriousness.

“For what little my opinion is worth,” he said eventually, “I have known you the better part of fifteen years, and I have never once believed you acted from cruelty, whatever your methods. Misguided, certainly. Overbearing, without question. But cruel? No, Hudson. Whatever else Cornelius believes tonight, I do not think even he truly believes that of you, not in his heart.”

“Perhaps not,” Hudson resigned, feeling as though it was a mistake to have come at all. “But intention has never been sufficient excuse for harm, however comforting the distinction feels to the one causing it.”

Moments later, he added quietly, “He believes it, and that is where the problem lies. I am not entirely certain he is wrong to.”

He did not remember agreeing to box that evening, though he supposed he must have, given that he found himself some time later with his knuckles wrapped and Owen circling him with far more caution than their usual sparring warranted.

“You are going to break my nose if you continue like that,” Owen observed, ducking a blow that had come rather closer than either of them expected.

“My apologies,” Hudson muttered, though he did not entirely mean it, and did not entirely stop, either, throwing himself into the exertion with a single-minded intensity that had less to do with the sport than with the desperate hope that enough physical effort might drown out the thoughts circling relentlessly through his mind.

“You might simply speak of it, rather than attempting to box your way through the matter,” Owen suggested, catching Hudson’s next swing on his forearm with a wince. “It would spare my nose considerably, and I suspect it might prove more effective besides.”

“I am not in a speaking mood.”

“Clearly. Though I note you have not stopped speaking since we began, merely redirected the words into your fists instead.”

Hudson said nothing to that, though he did, at least, ease the ferocity of his next several exchanges, some of the wilder edge draining out of his movements as exhaustion began to set in alongside whatever emotional reckoning still churned beneath it.

He was manipulative. He was selfish. He had only ever wanted things to go his way.

He thought of his father, decades past, refusing to hear a single word against Rosalie, dismissing his own son’s concerns as cruel judgment born of jealousy. He thought of himself now, refusing to hear a single word in favor of Edith, dismissing his brother’s love as an infatuation unworthy of consideration. He had told himself for years that he was nothing like his father – that his interference in Cornelius’ life came from a place his father’s blind devotion to Rosalie never had.

But perhaps the particulars mattered less than he had allowed himself to believe. Perhaps control was control, whatever justification one dressed it in, and perhaps he had spent so long congratulating himself on protecting his brother that he had never once stopped to ask whether his brother wanted, or needed, protecting at all.

And if that were true of Cornelius, some small, unwelcome voice in the back of his mind asked, what did it say of the rest of his life? Of a marriage entered into not through choice but through his own miscalculation, of a wife he had first sought to purchase off with a sum of money as though she were an inconvenience to be managed rather than a woman deserving of consideration?

Had he ruined her, the way he had so nearly ruined Cornelius?

Anna had built a life for herself and their children entirely without him, had done so competently, fiercely, without once requiring his assistance – and he had told himself, in his more self-satisfied moments, that his return had improved things for her. But perhaps that too was simply another version of the same old habit, mistaking his own presence for a gift rather than considering whether she might have been perfectly content without it.

“You have stopped moving,” Owen noted, lowering his own guard with evident concern. “Hudson.”

Hudson blinked, realizing he had gone entirely still in the middle of the ring, his thoughts having carried him somewhere far removed from the exercise at hand.

“I am well,” he said, though the words felt hollow even to his own ears.

Owen did not look convinced, but he had known Hudson long enough to recognize when pressing further would accomplish nothing.