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Sara rocked Hayden, likely without realizing she was doing it. “You asked me what I’ve been thinking, and the incident with Stanton and the wool cart came back to me.”

Sara didn’t need to elaborate.

Emma’s cheeks tingled, tears springing unwittingly to her eyes.

“I cannot live without him. I can’t.” When tears spilled onto her cheeks, she wiped them away and tried to make them stop. “But perhaps I must.”

She hardly noticed Sara standing, but suddenly she was crouched next to her. Sara put one arm around her and pulled her close. After looking at dear, sweet Hayden’s sleeping face, Emma sobbed into her sister-in-law’s shoulder, only stopping when she felt the wetness of her own tears.

Emma pushed away and then looked into another set of eyes as blue as her own. Hayden was awake. She reached for him, and Sara handed her nephew to her. She held him against her, soaking in his sweet smell, a combination of his mother’s and his own.

“Perhaps,” Sara said. She didn’t elaborate.

“Emma?”

Both women looked toward the oak door, which had swung open. Geoffrey.

“Something is wrong?”

“I—” She couldn’t deny it.

“She will be fine,” Sara said with such finality that her brother, rather than questioning her, simply walked toward his wife and thanked her with a kiss. He then came toward her, taking Hayden before she realized what he had been about.

“But I just got him,” Emma said.

“Then perhaps you should have been quicker, sister.” He winked, unapologetic.

Emma wiped away the last of her tears, well aware that her brother was still watching her.

She gestured toward a chair, but Geoffrey shook his head, pacing the room with his son instead. Emma sat, watching him. The look on her brother’s face nearly brought her to tears again. It was one of pure joy. And love. She understood it. Emma loved that baby with every fiber of her being.

“Did you come for Hayden?” Sara asked, sitting back down herself.

“Nay.” He looked at her, and Emma knew she wouldn’t like whatever he’d come to say.

“Graeme de Sowlis. He’s offered for you.”

An uncomfortable silence settled into the room. Sara stood, took Hayden from Geoffrey, and began to leave.

“Sara, why do you—” Emma started.

“’Tis time for you to talk.”

Though talking to Geoffrey was the last thing she had a mind to do—she knew what he’d say—it was time her brother knew the truth.

Geoffrey sat just as she started to stand, but he wouldn’t let her. “Sit, please. When you circle me like a buzzard eyeing his next meal, I find myself . . .”

A loud crackle from the fireplace stopped him. Or perhaps he was not prepared to continue. Either way, Emma had to prompt him to continue. “Aye?”

“I find myself thinking of Mother.”

Emma welcomed the vision that rose in her mind. Once, she would have shut out the memory of her mother. But no longer. Aye, it made her chest constrict, but the fear of not remembering, of her beloved parents fading over time, was too terrifying to contemplate. So she welcomed the smiling face in her thoughts.

“You know, you have much of her in you.”

“Geoffrey—”

He leaned forward, hands on his knees. “You cannot marry Lord Clave.”