His grip tightened faintly on the satchel. He nodded once, stiffly polite. “Of course. As you wish.”
He followed her down the corridor without another word.
There was nothing romantic about it—no lingering glances, no trembling breaths—only the quiet tread of his boots behind her, the faint hitch in his step as he adjusted the satchel in his hand, and the weight of everything they could not say to one another being held back.
She opened the study door and stood aside. He entered first, as manners required, and she shut the door gently behind them.
The room was warm from Dixon’s fire. Morning light spilled across the desk.
Margaret crossed to it at once, needing the anchor of movement. She set the folio down carefully, opened it, and selected several pages she had kept separate.
“I know you must be eager to return to Milton,” she began, smoothing the edges of the papers. “So, I will be direct, Mr. Thornton. This is entirely a business matter.”
He inclined his head. “Of course.”
His voice held no edge, no visible disappointment—but something inside her reacted to that calm, forced detachment with a painful throb. She laid the first page on the desk.
He gave it a cursory glance. “I know this one.”
“Yes,” she said. “We looked at it in Harcourt’s office. And again yesterday.” She slid the next page beside it.
He nodded once. “Also familiar.”
“And this.” Another sheet. “And this.”
His brow knit slightly—not in confusion, but in the quiet patience of a man indulging a point he did not yet see. “Miss Hale… I assure you there is no figure or clause there I have not examined.”
“I know,” she said softly. “That is precisely what troubled me.”
He looked up then, the faintest flicker of surprise passing through his eyes.
She drew a breath. “Everything you showed me yesterday… everything I have read since… led only to one conclusion. Yours.”
He stiffened almost imperceptibly.
“But,” she continued, “I kept feeling there was something we had overlooked—something neither of us saw because we were looking for answers in the wrong place.”
He took a step nearer. Not close enough to crowd her, but close enough that she felt it. “What do you mean?”
Margaret pressed her palm flat over the spread of documents—maps, deeds, marginal notes, the memorandum she had nearly discarded.
“There was a sequence,” she said. “Not in the accounts, and not in the ledgers. In the clauses. Across several documents.”
She lifted the top sheet, revealing the others arranged beneath in an order only she understood.
“At first glance, they are nothing. A condition here, a qualification there. Harcourt dismissed them as administrative formalities. But together…”
She swallowed, pulse hammering in her throat. “Together, they form something Mr. Bell intended very deliberately.”
Thornton stared at the pages, then at her—searching her face as though bracing himself for a blow.
“There is an answer, Mr. Thornton. One that may… or may not… be agreeable to you.”
11
He could not readher expression.
Margaret stood across the desk from him, poised as a negotiator, the folio spread between them in the pale winter light. Nothing in her posture—nothing in her voice—hinted at the nature of whatever she had yet to say.
