“I keep going through the notebook,” she revealed. “The more I read it, the more certain I become that my father was not chasing shadows. Langley was there. I know he was. He had something to do with it.”
Owen nodded. “I can vouch for the fact that he was one of the main people in that whole affair.”
Aurelia turned slightly toward him. “You are certain.”
“Yes.” He drew a breath. “Whether Langley himself ordered the cover-up or only benefited from it, I cannot yet say. But the original mistake, the decision that led to the disaster, was his. He was in charge of the mission.”
Aurelia’s eyes sharpened.
Owen looked out toward the water and continued before he could reconsider. “I knew even then that something was being concealed. There were conversations after, official versions that did not sit cleanly against what had happened. But I was junior. I had no authority over what was said or how the matter was shaped afterward, and they always made it appear as if it were nothing of consequence, just boring bureaucracy.”
Aurelia was quiet.
He went on, more heavily now. “I did not realize, then, what it would cost beyond the immediate thing. Men died … men I knew, men I fought with, even there.”
When he finally looked back at her, the expression on her face was not what he had expected.
“You … were there?” she asked.
He nodded once.
“I had not understood that,” she sounded confused. “I thought … you spoke as though you had only known of it afterward, or from a distance.”
There was no accusation in her voice yet, but there was hurt in the misunderstanding itself, and Owen felt it keenly.
“I am sorry I was not clearer,” he apologized at once. “If I gave you that impression, it was not deliberate.”
But even as he said it, he knew it was only partly true. He had not meant to deceive her precisely, yet he had allowed her to believe him further removed than he had been because it was easier.
Aurelia looked away.
The sounds of Thomas and Clara at the water came back into sudden prominence. Their laughter, the splashing and the bright ordinary life of the afternoon were continuing only yards away while something colder settled between him and Aurelia on the blanket.
“I did not lie to you,” Owen tried to explain, hating how defensive the words sounded.
“No,” she echoed, still not looking at him. “You merely did not tell me.”
He had no good answer to that. The ease of the day, which only moments before had seemed almost miraculous, had tightened again. Owen could feel the distance opening where he had only just begun to believe it was closing.
“I … do not know what to make of that,” he heard her whisper.
He could not blame her. He scarcely knew what to make of himself in it.
“I should have been earnest from the start,” he admitted.
“Yes,” she nodded.
Nothing in her voice was raised, nothing dramatic or cruel. Yet the softness of it made the truth sharper.
Owen looked toward the lake again, toward Thomas and Clara and their uncomplicated happiness, and thought with somebitterness that simple things never seemed to remain simple for long.
When they rose a short while later to join the others, the conversation between him and Aurelia had gone careful again. And though the park remained lovely, and the afternoon outwardly successful, Owen carried away from it the unwelcome knowledge that he had finally shown her one of the things about himself he most disliked: not the lie, perhaps, but the instinct to hold back the truth until it became impossible to explain why he had withheld it at all.
Chapter 18
That night, Owen received Aurelia’s letter just as he was beginning to think he had no right to expect one.
He had spent the journey home from the park in a state of restless dissatisfaction, displeased with himself in a way that felt both familiar and particularly unwelcome. There had been moments on the picnic blanket when he had almost forgotten himself entirely. With Aurelia, in the open air, with the grass cool beneath them and the soft movement of leaves overhead, he had felt something dangerously close to ease.
