He pointed at a column of figures. “These are the wage advances. I—” His voice broke off, and he tried again. “I’ve kept them steady. Even when the books—” Another hard stop. “I should not have.”
“You were looking after the men,” she said, before he could turn the words against himself.
He stared at the page, jaw rigid. “I thought it my duty.”
“It is.”
He glanced at her then, quick and raw. “Duty doesn’t keep a mill standing.”
“Yet,youkept it standing.”
His cheek flinched. “At great cost.” He exhaled sharply—not a laugh, not agreement, something closer to surrender. “There are debts you haven’t seen yet. I should show you the rest.”
“Please,” she said.
He tried to turn the next sheet but stopped halfway. His hand hovered. She didn’t understand what halted him until he said, very quietly, “I should warn you. Some of it is… not pleasant.”
“I would rather hear it from you.”
His fingers tightened on the page. A tremor passed through him—barely there, but she saw it. “Very well.”
7
He continued, walking herthrough the arrears, the overdrawn accounts, the machinery repairs he had put off too long. His words came stiffly at first, as if each admission scraped a layer of dignity from him. Once or twice, he stumbled over a figure, and she leaned forward without thinking, trying to see the line as he struggled to find it.
Her shoulder brushed his. He went still.
She drew back immediately. “Forgive me—I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right,” he said, but his voice had gone rough. When he spoke again, his tone was steadier, but the roughness beneath it had not dissipated. “I spoke the truth when I advised you to sell. There is nothing for you at Marlborough Mills. Better to cut your losses, Miss Hale, as Bell ought to have done six months ago.”
“I only asked to be given the chance to decide that for myself,” she said. “Perhaps there is some solution that has not yet been…” She faltered even as the words staled in her mouth.
Something in him appeared to snap. “Do you think I have not considered every option? That I have not pursued any means Icould and that you, who—” He cut himself off, looking almost angry at the sentence. “You cannot mend this, Miss Hale.”
Margaret looked away. “I do not mean to imply that I possess some wisdom you do not. But perhaps…” She closed her eyes and sighed at the ceiling. “Perhaps I only needed to hear it once more. To argue the matter through, I suppose.”
A flicker appeared at the corner of his mouth. “You always did fancy an argument.”
Margaret allowed her features to warm. “It was nearly the only thing we had in common, sir.”
Was that a flush in his cheek? A heat creeping up from his collar and bleeding into the lines of his face?
For one impossible breath, she nearly spoke his name. NotMr. Thornton, but the name that belonged to a moment long past—when he had stood in her father’s doorway, awkward and earnest and far too perceptive for her comfort. She felt it rise, fragile and reckless, a word that might have opened everything they had locked away.
His eyes dropped to her hands—clasped too tightly in her lap—and then lifted to her face with the quietest invitation she had ever seen.
A question.
A hope.
A fear so raw it trembled through the air between them.
“Miss Hale—” he began, and the sound of it—low, uncertain, almost gentle—struck her like a hand pressed to a wound she had hidden too long.
She drew a sharp breath. If she opened her mouth now—if she dared—she might speak of the station. She might speak of that split-second choice that had ruined his trust in her. She might speak of Frederick. And Spain. And the look in Mr. Bell’s eyes when he urged her to keep him safe.
She felt the words rise. She felt them tremble. She felt them burn.
