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“And there is Eloise,” Daniel said. “Who asked me last month whether her papa was happy now. She asked it very quietly, which means she had been carrying the question for some time. I told her ‘yes’, because I believe he is.” He paused. “Am I right?”

Adam groaned. “You know I cannot⁠—”

“Adam,” Daniel said it without lightness. “Am I right?”

Now, Adam set his glass down. He looked at the far wall, the rain, the portrait of some long-forgotten member above the mantelpiece.

“Yes,” he said. “You are right.”

“What is it,” Daniel said, “that you are most afraid of losing? If it goes wrong. Give me the specific thing.”

He did not answer immediately. He looked at his hands.

“She sat in the Hampshire sitting room last week,” he said, “with her feet tucked up under her and a glass of claret in her hand, and she asked me something about my father. Something I have not spoken about in years. She listened the way she listens, which is without any agenda, and then she told me about a lane in Lincolnshire and her mother. It was the most ordinary conversation, and I did not think about the estate, or the duchy, or Penhurst, or any of the things I am supposed to be managing.” He stopped. “I thought about how the fire looked behind her head.”

Daniel said nothing.

“That is what I am afraid of losing,” Adam said. “That is the specific thing.”

“Then here is the matter plainly.” Daniel sat back. “She is not Charlotte. You are not the man you were at twenty-five. The damage you are most afraid of doing is not the damage you’ll do if you let her in. It is the damage you will absolutely do if you decide, from fear, that you cannot.”

He picked up his hat from the chair beside him. “You can close yourself back up and keep her at exactly the right distance and call it consideration. She will understand what is happening. She is not a woman who misses things.” He looked at Adam. “And she will close up too. And the two of you will manage a very respectable marriage from opposite ends of a corridor until Eloise grows up and leaves, and then there will be nothing left to manage it for.”

He stood. “Or,” he said, “you could decide that you are, in fact, capable of not ruining this. And then try not to ruin it.” He put his hat on.

“I recognize this is a more demanding position. I recommend it regardless.”

And with that piece of advice, Daniel left him.

A man capable of not ruining this.

He had no idea whether he was that man…whether he could be that man. Before Juliet came into his life, he’d tried to at least be a father Eloise could remember…a father who kept her safe. But now, with Juliet, he found himself wanting for more…reaching for more…aching for more.

No, he was aching for her. But what…what could he do if Juliet fell out of love with him? What could he do if Juliet left him? It would certainly devastate his little daughter—of that he was certain—but he also knew that it would devastate him…maybe even more than it would Eloise.

And maybe that was exactly what he was scared of.

Chapter Twenty

In the dream, he was at the lake.

He always was.

The water was the color it had been that morning: flat, slate-gray, the oaks on the far bank barely visible in the fog.

Charlotte was already at the water’s edge, her nightgown trailing behind her on the wet grass.

Adam opened his mouth, and his voice failed him the way voices do in dreams, present but hollow, nothing behind it.

He watched her walk in. He watched the water take her, unhurried, up to her knees and then her waist, the white nightgown spreading out around her like a spilled page, and then she was gone.

And then he heard the crying.

Eloise.

She was behind him on the bank, her small hands open at her sides, her face turned toward the water.

He crossed to her in the dream’s terrible slow motion, and she looked up at him, and her eyes were wet, and she said: