She pointed to a place at the base of the bed.
“What do we do?”
She sighed, squaring off with the unseen ghost. Her arms were crossed and her chin lifted as she looked into the shadows. “We try to figure out what he wants.”
“What he wants?” Wasn’t it obvious? “He doesn’t like us together.”
She shook her head. “He’s been haunting you for a long while now. Long before you and I found each other again.”
He nodded but still felt completely stupid. “What does he want then?”
She huffed out a breath. “This is why I usually do this with Gwenivere. She can hear them. I just get—” She winced. He did the same because pain had spiked through his temple.
“What?”
“Wails,” she said. “That’s all I hear. Wails.”
“So how do we talk to him?”
She shrugged. “We guess. He’ll respond.”
“And you see this? You see him?”
She nodded. But then she looked straight at him, not into the shadows. “What do you think he wants?”
He snorted. “He hates how I’m running things. He hates the school I’ve built. He hates how I’m spending money on the tenants rather than on the manor house. He hates how I’m voting in the House of Lords. It could be any one of those. Or all of them.”
Her expression softened. “I thought I couldn’t love you any more,” she whispered.
What? Had he heard that correctly? He opened his mouth to ask, but she turned back to the shadows.
“Well? Is that it? You hate his politics?”
Pain lanced through his temples again. And when it faded, Jonathan looked to her.
“Does he hate me so much?” Some small part of him had hoped that his father might be proud. After all, his father had often said that taking care of the tenants was important, as was the school. But his father had never actually done it, and Jonathan had.
“No,” she said, her expression quizzical. “I think when he screams like that it’s a denial. Like we’re completely off base.” She focused on the shadows. “Is that it?” she asked.
They both waited, and Jonathan’s shoulders were hunched in preparation for a stab of pain. But nothing happened.
“So…that’s a yes?” Jonathan asked. “He doesn’t hate what I’ve done with the estate?”
She nodded. “Apparently not.”
Relief shot through him. His father wasn’t rejecting the choices he’d made. Which, in turn, made him feel like his father hadn’t rejected him.
“But then what does he want?”
Giselle shook her head. “You have no idea?”
“None.”
“When he passed,” she asked. “Were you fighting?”
“No. We’d stopped speaking about anything meaningful a few years ago. He knew I had different ideas than he did, but neither of us wanted an argument. So we didn’t discuss anything of merit.”
She looked back to the shadows. “Is that it? Is there something you want to tell him?”
