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She went away, Papa…

He woke with a gasp, sitting up hard enough that the bedclothes fell from him, moist and drenched with his sweat.

The room was dark, and the clock on the mantel read half past two.

For a long time, he did nothing but listen to the house. The deep absence of sound told him Eloise was asleep in her room down the corridor, and the rest of Ravenlocke was sealed off from the night.

His shirt was wet through, and he was still shaking, which he noted with a poignant irritation. He could not lie back down, obviously.

Now so horribly chased out of sleep, Adam swung his feet down to the floor and got out of bed. With legs that still trembled, he went to the window and opened the sash, standing in the cold air until the shaking had fully passed.

Then he went to his desk and sank into his chair.

He had not had the dream in weeks, but he didn’t have to think too long to know what had brought it back. He had known it as soon as he woke, the way he knew the cause of a wound.

The sound of her laugh was the only thing he could somehow remember now, even in the throes of his terror.

He had let someone in again.

It was as simple as that.

Shaking his head to orient himself, Adam pulled the estate correspondence toward him and worked until the sky grayed at the windows and the first housemaid’s footsteps moved through the corridor below.

Then he washed, dressed, and went down to breakfast as though he had slept.

Over the next week, Adam made sure that he was…polite.

He’d never been the kind of man who allowed his problems or his fears to come out as cruelty, so he simply tried to continue as he had always done. He was at the table for breakfast and dinner; he answered her questions whenever she asked; he said good morning and good night every day.

He found partially true reasons not to be alone with her—the estate steward needed three meetings in four days. After that, there was the issue of the east field drainage requiring correspondence.

What was not true was that any of these things had previously kept him from the sitting room where she spent her evenings, or from the library where she read in the afternoons. He had gone to both places without occasion before his nightmares had come to remind him why he’d kept his distance for many years…so, he simply stopped.

Of course, just because he kept his distance did not mean he did not see her notice.

On the second morning after he’d begun his campaign to regain the distance between them, she came into the breakfast room, and there was a pause before she sat down, barely a thing at all, and then she reached for the bread without looking at him.

On the third day, when he came in from the stables while she was crossing the hall and said good morning, intending to walk past without stopping, she had simply said good morning back, her voice carrying nothing a reasonable man could name as injury.

That had given him pause, even though she did not turn around.

Then, at dinner that evening, she tried once to ask him about the drainage the steward had raised, and he answered in the most economical eight words he could muster, picking up his wine then to keep his mouth busy so he wouldn’t have to say any more. She had not tried again.

On the third evening, he passed the library on his way to the stairs and the door was half open. Her voice came through the gap, low and unhurried, mid-sentence, and he could hear Eloise’s occasional murmured questions in between. Of course, he’d stopped, standing there in the corridor with his hand on nothing, merely listening to her read.

Adam thought he might be taking things too far…but those thoughts never fully formed before he roughly threw them out. He knew he had to do this, to protect his…daughter.

And yet, even as he thought this…it was very nearly too much to walk away from them in that moment. But he managed it in the end.

He walked away, but that was the last time he was able to do so.

On the fourth day, she knocked on his study door.

He was standing at his desk, sleeves rolled to the elbows, his hand on an open ledger. At the knock, he went still.

She stood in the doorway. She had a book under her arm that she was not reading. She looked at him across the length of the room, and her chin was up.

“Have I done something wrong?” She asked directly, without any embellishment. And the bluntness of the question made him flinch…just a tiny bit.