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“Cornelius will come around,” he assured instead, more gently. “Give him time. He has carried that anger a long while, and it will not dissolve in a single evening, however honest your conversation was.”

“That is not the only thing that troubles me,” Hudson admitted, unwrapping his knuckles slowly.

“Then what does?”

Hudson was quiet for a long moment, staring at nothing in particular, before he finally gave voice to the thought that had lodged itself beneath his ribs and refused to be dislodged.

“I keep wondering,” he started, quietly, “Whether I have done to Anna precisely what I have always done to Cornelius. Whether everything I have called protection, or duty, or care, has simply been another means of holding onto control over someone who never asked for it.”

Owen’s expression sobered considerably.

“Do you believe that is true?”

Hudson thought of Anna’s face across the breakfast table that morning – the careful, guarded warmth she had only recently begun to allow herself around him, the fragile trust he had spent weeks trying to earn back an inch at a time. He thought, too, of the way he had treated her when he believed she was someone else – someone he had deemed a nuisance, had insulted without regard, and attempted to pay her off in hopes she would stay away from his brother, and felt a fresh wave of shame settle over the memory.

“I do not know,” Hudson said quietly. “But I find I am rather afraid to ask her.”

The ride home did nothing to settle him.

He watched the familiar streets pass by the carriage window without truly seeing them, Cornelius’ words circling endlessly through his mind alongside a dozen memories he had not examined so closely in years. His father’s face, flushed with the particular happiness of a man newly infatuated, dismissing his son’s warnings and making up a silly tale of envy. His own face, he suspected, wearing much the same expression of wounded certainty each time Cornelius had dared question his judgment.

Manipulative. Selfish.

He thought of the money he had offered Anna that first night, as though her silence and her friend’s heartbreak were commodities to be purchased at a fair price. He thought of the months he had spent away from his own children, congratulating himself on having done right by leaving, when in truth he had simply been avoiding the reckoning that came with staying. He thought of every instance in which he had told himself he acted from love, and wondered, with a discomfort that settled deep in his chest, how many of those instances might look rather different from where Anna stood.

By the time the carriage drew up outside the estate, he had arrived at no comfortable conclusions, only a raw, unfamiliar uncertainty that sat poorly on a man accustomed to being certain of himself in all things.

He did not go looking for her that evening. He told himself it was because the hour was late, because she was likely occupied with the children, because there was no sense disturbing her with a conversation he had not yet found the words to begin.

He suspected, if he were honest with himself, that it was simply easier to avoid the question than to risk hearing an answer he was not prepared to bear.

It was a cowardice he did not care to examine too closely, and so, for the first time in a few days, he retired to his study alone, and did not seek her out at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Something had changed, and Anna could not for the life of her determine what.

It had been three days since the morning in the nursery – three days since Hudson had kissed her so carelessly and walked away as though it meant nothing at all – and in that time, he had retreated so thoroughly behind his old composure that Anna wondered, with a growing unease, if she had imagined the warmth of that morning entirely.

She replayed it often, in the quiet moments between the twins’ demands and her own restless thoughts – the ease of his laughter over the ruined shirt, the softness in his voice when he spoke of Lucy’s fierce spirit. How he had hesitated before he brought up the matter of seeing his brother soon, followed by the casual press of his lips against hers that had left her standing frozen in the middle of the nursery long after he’d gone.

None of it had felt like performance. And yet here she was, three days later, watching that same warmth retreat behind a wall she had thought, foolishly perhaps, they had already dismantled together.

He was not unkind. That, at least, she could not accuse him of. He still appeared at breakfast, still asked after the children with what seemed like genuine interest, still inquired politely after her own well-being. But the ease that had grown between them over the preceding weeks – the teasing, the lingering glances, the small, unguarded moments she had come to treasure more than she cared to admit – had vanished, replaced by a courteous distance that felt, if anything, worse than the outright coldness of their earlier acquaintance.

“Would you care to join me for a walk this afternoon?” she had asked him yesterday, hopeful.

“I have correspondence to attend to,” he had responded, not quite meeting her eyes. “Perhaps another day.”

There had been no other day. Nor had there been one the day before that, when she had invited him to accompany her into town to collect a new set of gowns for the twins – an errand she could now conduct in the open, without fear of some maid’s careless slip reaching his ears, and one she had thought he might enjoy for the novelty of it, if nothing else.

“I have an obligation to Owen this afternoon,” Hudson had informed her, not looking up from the correspondence spread across his desk when she had put the suggestion to him.

“You saw Owen only yesterday.”

“There are matters concerning our investment in the club that require attention,” he had replied curtly, which might even have been true, though something in the careful blankness of his expression suggested to Anna that it was, at the very least, an excuse of convenience rather than genuine necessity.

“Of course,” she had nodded, swallowing around the lump of uncertainty in her throat, retreating before her disappointment could show itself too plainly on her face. “Another time, perhaps.”