“Return the parcel. Without reply.”
Rosamund stood. Clara slid from her lap and retreated to the window seat, watching them silently, her eyes wide.
“Without consulting me?”
“Without delay.” He turned to face her. “The items were selected with precision. Exactly the sort of gifts a child would treasure and refuse to surrender. That is not generosity. That is a hook baited for a six-year-old.”
“It is a wooden horse, Tristan. Not a conspiracy.”
“A wooden horse from a man who tried to take your sister from you. Sent to a child whose affection he has no right to court.”
“She does not have many toys.” Her voice had gone quieter. “She has Bess, and the rocking horse you gave her, and charcoal stubs. That is the whole of her childhood. And you returned a gift that would have made her laugh without asking whether the laughter was worth the risk.”
“The laughteristhe risk.” He stepped closer. “Men like your uncle do not give gifts without purpose. Every kindness is designed to create obligation. He cannot reach Clara through the courts—I have seen to that. So he will reach her through her heart, because a child’s heart has no solicitor. He can buy her… anything she wishes to have.”
“You cannot know that is his intent.”
“I know what he is.”
The words dropped between them with more weight than their syllables carried. Rosamund searched his face—the hard line of his mouth, the tension beneath his temples.
“You speak as though you have evidence. But all I see is a man who sent his niece a toy. If you have more than suspicion, thentell me.”
His jaw compressed. She watched him weigh something behind his expression—a calculation more complex than the one she was asking him to show.
“I have reasons you are not yet ready to hear.”
“That is insufferable.”
“It is the truth.”
“It is a wall. You build them constantly—between yourself and everyone who might require an explanation. You build them with silence and competence and the certainty that you alone understand the danger, and you leave the rest of us standing on the other side.”
“I am trying to protect you.”
“Then protect me with honesty, not silence.”
The room held still. Clara sat on the window seat with Bess clutched to her chest, her gaze moving between them as though she understood the magnitude of it.
“Your uncle’s note.” Tristan picked it up and held it out. “Read it.”
She took the paper. Edwin’s handwriting—once cold and formal—now breathed with warmth. He spoke of family, of memory, of a day when Clara had been an infant and he had held her in the crook of his arm. He wished the child every happiness. He hoped she would think of her uncle fondly.
Rosamund read it twice.
“He never held Clara as an infant.” Her voice was flat. “He was not there. He did not visit once in the first two years of her life.”
Tristan said nothing. The point had arrived without his assistance.
Rosamund pressed her knuckles against the edge of the desk.
“You were right. The gifts cannot go to Clara. Not from him. Not yet.” She drew breath. “But you will tell me, Tristan. When the time comes. You will tell me what you know about Edwin. All of it. I am not made of glass. I am made of whatever is left when glass has already been broken and reassembled by hand.”
A muscle moved beneath his jaw.
“I promise.”
She nodded. Picked up the illustrated fable book—the one gift that held no hook, that was simply a book, beautiful and innocent.
