“Then help me understand.”
“No.” The word was flat.
Emmeline’s breath hitched. A cold weight settled in the center of her chest, expanding until it hit her ribs, then igniting into a sudden, blinding heat.
“No,” she repeated. “That is all you ever give. No, stop, do not ask, do not speak, do not feel. Aaron is not to grieve. I am not to expect. You are not to explain. Is that how this house survives,Your Grace? By forbidding every feeling before it can become inconvenient?”
His shoulders rose with a slow breath. “You knownothingof what feeling can cost.”
The quietness of it struck her harder than if he had shouted. For a moment, she saw his face in the carriage as he looked at his sleeping son and her anger faltered.
“I know what it costs to lose someone,” she said, her voice softer now, but no less intense. “I know what it costs to watch a house grow quiet after laughter has left it. Do not stand there and tell me I know nothing of grief simply because I do not use silence as proof of endurance.”
Something in his expression shifted. It moved through his eyes first, a flash of recognition perhaps, or pain, then vanished behind that hard mask again.
His eyes dropped to her throat. The movement was slow this time, helplessly slow, as though he could not stop himself from following the rhythm there. Her body answered with a rush of heat that mortified her.
Even now.
“I will provide for you,” he said, voice rougher. “I will protect you. I will see that your father wants for nothing. You shall haveauthority in my house, respect before my servants, and every comfort due to your position.”
“And affection?” she asked.
His mouth hardened.
“And children?” she continued, though the question felt like stepping barefoot over glass. “Will I have those too? Or are they also an unnecessary motion?”
His expression changed at once and Emmeline already knew what he would say.
“No,” he said.
The simplicity of it stole her breath. “No?”
“I already have an heir.”
Her lips parted, but no sound came at first. Nothing emotional—only that hard, practical sentence, delivered as if she had asked after estate accounts.
“I see,” she whispered.
But she did not see. Not really. Her mind could not shape itself around a life with no children of her own, no family grown from love.
His gaze sharpened, as though he heard the break in her voice. “Emmeline?—”
“You have decided this too?” she asked, and now the hurt was so large it made her calm. “Like everything else?”
His jaw clenched. “I have decided that I will not bring more children into this house.”
“Because you already have the one required of you.”
“You have known Aaron for a day,” Rowan said, the restraint in his voice thinning. “You cannot understand what I am protecting him from.”
“From siblings?”
“From chaos.”
“Children are not chaos.”
“No,” he said, his voice low. “But they can be born into it.”
