“He used my mother’s pearl-handled pistol,” the Duke said, almost conversationally. “A wedding gift from her father.”
She reached for his hand again. This time, he held on tightly.
“We do not have to—”
“Yes. I do.” He stepped inside, pulling her gently with him. “I’ve let this room haunt me long enough.”
They moved slowly, stopping at the desk.
A letter lay half-written, ink long dry.
“His farewell note,” the Duke said. “He never finished it.”
Celine read the first line:My dearest Elias, by the time you read this, I will have taken the coward’s way...
“Don’t,” he said sharply, turning it face-down. “I have read it enough times to know it by heart.”
He swallowed.
“He apologised. Explained his debts. Told me to be a better man than he was.” His voice roughened. “As if a thirteen-year-old needed that burden added to finding his father’s body.”
“You were a child. None of it was your responsibility.”
“Wasn’t it?” His jaw tightened. “I’m his son. His heir. His mistakes became my inheritance as surely as the title.” He lifted a ledger from the desk, turning pages with a grim, almost morbid fascination. “Look at this. He recorded every loss—meticulously—perhaps believing that documenting his ruin made it somehow more palatable.”
Celine stepped beside him, reading over his shoulder. Spiral after spiral of figures. Desperate, jagged notations. Then—
“Wait,” she murmured. “Look at that one.”
“December fourteenth. The day before…”
“He won,” she said, tracing the sum with her fingertip. “He won fifteen thousand pounds—half of what he owed.”
The Duke stared at the entry. “I never knew. I assumed he’d lost everything that night.”
“He won—and it still wasn’t enough. Or perhaps…” She turned to the next page. “Perhaps he returned the next night to win the rest—and lost everything instead.”
“The gambler’s curse,” he said quietly. “Never knowing when to stop.”
They moved through the room slowly, uncovering more records—each another stone in the avalanche that had swallowed his father. But there were other things too: letters from his mother filled with warmth; childish drawings labelledPapa, from Elias; a family portrait painted before the cracks began to show.
“You look like him,” Celine observed softly, studying the painted faces.
“I know. It’s why my mother could scarcely bear to look at me during the last years.” He touched his younger self’s face. “She said I had his looks but hoped I’d inherited her sense.”
“You have both. His intelligence. Her strength.”
“His propensity for obsession,” he countered. “Her need for control.”
“Their love for you.” She pointed to the way both painted parents inclined subtly toward the child between them. “Whatever their faults, they loved you.”
“Love wasn’t enough to save either of them.”
“No,” she agreed. “But it was enough to save you. Your mother’s love kept you from following your father’s path. And perhaps…”
“Perhaps what?”
“Perhaps it is time to stop living in reaction to their ghosts.”
