Aaron beamed.
Juliet watched him with open longing. “He has grown.”
“Yes,” Emmeline said. “He has.”
“And you love him.”
The words were simple. They nearly undid her.
Emmeline looked at Aaron, at the boy laughing as Biscuit tried to drag a stick twice his size along the path, and the ache inside her shifted into something tender and absolute.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
Juliet’s face crumpled again, but this time there was relief in it too. “I am glad.”
Emmeline swallowed, forcing the tears back because she had spent enough of them in private and would not spend them here. “So am I.”
They walked on, the puppy bounding ahead, Aaron’s laughter rising into the pale morning, Juliet quiet beside her. Emmeline smiled when the boy looked back, called encouragement when Biscuit tripped over his own paws, and kept her voice bright enough that no child would hear the fracture beneath it.
Inside, she felt hollow. It felt as though something precious had been placed in her hands for one brief, impossible season, warm and alive, and then taken away before she had learned how to hold it safely.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“May I speak with you?”
Juliet’s voice came from the study doorway, soft enough that once it would have touched him. The same voice that had once whispered outside his chamber, asking if she might sit near the fire because their father had been in one of his moods.
He hated that it still reached him, but did not look up from the letter before him.
“I am occupied,” he said.
Juliet stepped inside anyway. “You have been occupied all morning.”
His fingers tightened around the paper. “Then you understand the matter is urgent.”
“Rowan.”
That almost did it. The simple plea in his name moved through him like a blade turned slowly, but he kept his face lowered, his expression fixed into cold attention. If he forgave too quickly, what had all the terror been worth?
He set the letter down with deliberate care. “Did you require something?”
Juliet flinched. He saw it at the edge of his vision and hated himself for noticing.
“I wanted to apologize properly.”
At last, he looked at her.
She stood near the door in a pale morning gown, her hands twisting together at her waist. Guilt had hollowed her face, but defiance had not entirely left her eyes. She was still Juliet, his sister. Yet, she had chosen Frederick’s shelter over his.
“You hid from me for weeks,” he said. “There is no apology that makes that smaller.”
“I know.” Her voice shook, but she did not look away. “I was unfair to you.”
His expression did not change, but something in his chest sharpened.
Juliet swallowed. “I told myself you would have forced me to marry Lord Wellfield. I told myself you would choose duty and reputation before me, because that made it easier to run and hide. But it was not true, was it?”
Rowan said nothing.
