He closed his book, giving her his full attention. “You are determined to discover something redeemable in me.”
“I am determined to see what is already there.”
“And if what is there disappoints you?”
“Then I shall at least be disappointed by truth rather than comforted by illusion.”
“Truth,” he repeated. “You attach great value to it.”
“Do you not?”
“I attach value to control. To predictability. To structures that keep chaos from the door.” He rose, moving to stand before the fire, the light gilding his profile. “Truth is frequently the enemy of such things.”
“Or their foundation,” she countered. “You cannot command what you refuse to see, nor anticipate what you refuse to acknowledge.”
He exhaled—quiet, measured. “Speaking of acknowledgement… Iamtrying, Celine. To lower these walls. These distances. These carefully arranged interactions.”
“I know,” she said gently. “But try harder.”
“Celine—”
“Tell me something real. Something that isn’t about control or your father or the past. Tell me who you are when no one is watching.”
He was silent for so long she thought he would refuse. Then, quietly:
“I read poetry,” he said. “Byron, Keats, Shelley. The Romantics you’d expect me to despise. I read them late at night when I can’t sleep, which is most nights. I find their chaos oddly soothing—all that passion spent on paper where it can’t hurt anyone.”
“That is a beginning,” she said softly. “What else?”
“I compose music. Badly. I burn the sheets immediately, but the mathematics of harmony—of rules producing beauty—comforts me.”
“More.”
“I swim in the lake at the country estate,” he said, eyes distant. “In October, when the water is so cold it feels like dying—and also like being unequivocally alive.” He turned away from the fire. “And I speak to my mother’s portrait. About my day, myplans, my repeated failure at being the son she hoped I might become.”
“She would be proud of you.”
“She would be horrified by what I’ve become.”
“A successful duke? A responsible landowner? A man who pays pensions to former servants and reads poetry in secret?”
“A man who bought a wife at a gaming table.”
“A man who saved a family from ruin.”
“Same action,” he murmured, “different interpretation.”
“Same truth,” she corrected, “different perspective.”
She moved toward him, unable to maintain distance when he was being this vulnerable. “One more thing. Tell me one more true thing.”
He looked at her then. Really looked. And she saw everything he hid from the world—fear, longing, hope, uncertainty—all flickering through his eyes like candlelight threatened by a draft.
“I’m frightened,” he said quietly. “Of you. Of this. Of the possibility that I might—improbably—become the sort of husband you deserve. But most of all, I’m frightened that I amnot,that I will fail you, and that one day you will look at me and see precisely what the world sees—nothing but a beast attempting to impersonate a man.”
She lifted her hands to his face, cradling it as though he were something breakable. “You are not a beast,” she whispered. “You are a man doing the best he can with the wounds he carries. And that is enough. More than enough.”
He caught her wrists—not pushing her away, not drawing her in, simply holding. Anchoring himself.
