Mr. Bell. Dead?
He gripped the desk with both hands as he read the rest mechanically, the words forming shapes but not sense:
Bell. Dead.In South America. Affairs to be settled next month in London.
Thornton closed his eyes.
Bell had been…
Well, he had been—what?
A friend, certainly. A benefactor. A man who had trusted him when trust was still a novelty. Hale’s dearest companion. And Margaret’s godfather in all but name.
Margaret.
Her name cracked through him like a shot.
Before he meant to do it—before he even understood the impulse—his hand slid to the right-hand drawer of his desk. He opened it quietly, almost reverently. The book lay inside, its dark spine familiar as an old friend. Plato’s Dialogues. The very volume he and Mr. Hale had pored over together on quiet evenings, disputing arguments and tracing passages with equal relish. It had been theirs—student and tutor, equals in spirit if not learning.
But the book had not come to him from Hale.
It had been placed in his hands by Margareton the morning she left Milton, her voice cool and detached, though her eyes were anything but. A farewell gift, she had called it. Something her father would have wished him to keep. Thornton had accepted it then with awkward gratitude, knowing too well how much it cost her to part with anything of Mr. Hale’s so soon after his death.
Even now, as he lifted it from the drawer, a faint chill travelled through him. There were griefs bound up in these pages—but something more, something he had never dared speculate. He lifted it now, the familiar weight settling into his palm like memory itself.
Nearly every day since, he had sworn off opening it again. Not because of Mr. Hale—Thornton’s grief for that gentle, flawed, beloved mentor was clean and honest. It was Margaret he could not bear to confront. Yet his fingers betrayed him. They always did.
He let the book fall open to the place where something—not a bookmark, not entirely—rested between the pages.
A narrow strip of ivory ribbon lay there, its edges faintly scalloped, the center embroidered in pale blue silk thread. He recognized her handiwork at once—the patient care in each stitch, the slight irregularity of the lettering where her needle had hesitated. Margaret had copied a line from the dialogue he and Mr. Hale had debated more than once:
“We must remember that we fight not for ourselves alone.”
He had stared at those words for hours the night he first discovered them. It was a line Hale had often quoted when urging him toward mercy, and one Margaret herself had spoken—quietly, bravely—on the day of the riots.
But had she stitched it for her father? Left it in the book by accident?
Or…
He shut the thought down, the same way he had been shutting it down for months.
He could not know.
And he dared not hope.
Still, he remembered the shock of that first discovery—the way he had sat motionless for nearly an hour, undone by a ribbon no bigger than his thumb. Shaken by the possibility that she hadmeanthim to find it… tormented by the fear that she had not.
Should he have returned it?
Would she expect him to?
Or… had she left it forhim?
He could never ask. He had never dared.
But dear God, he had imagined.
His thumb brushed the edge of the ribbon, tracing the shape of her neat stitches. He did not lift it from the page; he never did. It felt almost sacrilegious to disturb something so intimately touched by her hand.
