“Forgive me,” she said. “I know this is a private matter. But Thomas asked me to come.”
“He did?” Margaret asked.
“He is in the nursery. He asked me to tell you—” She paused, steadying herself. “—that he loves you both. That Grandmother’s hugs are ‘tight in a good way,’ and that Grandfather asks better questions than anyone, save Miss Weston.”
Margaret let out a broken laugh.
“He also asked me to say,” Lorraine continued, her composure faltering, “that he does not wish to choose. He does not wish to lose anyone else. He has lost enough.”
Silence settled again—different now.
Lorraine looked at Dominic. The glance lasted no more than a second, but it carried everything—the gallery, the library, the narrow bed, the wordcoward, the wordlove, the three months of patient, ferocious, transformative grace that had made this moment possible.
Fight,her eyes said.You’re doing it. Keep going.
He turned back to the Hardings.
“I ask that Thomas remain at Rovewood,” Dominic said. “Not as a rejection of you. Never that. You are his family. His history. But this is his home. And I—”
He stopped. Then, steadily:
“I love him. He is my son. Not by blood, nor by law, but by every measure that matters. I have failed him, apologised, and tried again. I wish to go on trying. I wish to raise him.”
The silence that followed was full.
James looked to Margaret. She looked to him. Something passed between them—long familiarity, shared loss, and understanding.
“Your Grace,” James said, “may I ask one question?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Weston. What is she to you?”
The question was not hostile. It was the question of a man who had been watching, as he had watched everything, with the quiet perceptiveness that had made him one of the most effective diplomats in the East India Company’s service.
Dominic looked at Lorraine.
She looked back at him. Steady. Unflinching.
“She is everything,” he said. “And I intend to marry her—if she will have me.”
Lorraine’s composure broke—not into tears, but into a smile so bright it seemed to alter the light in the room.
Margaret watched her. Watched him. And something in her expression gentled.
“William,” she said softly. “William would have liked her.”
“Yes,” James agreed. “He would.”
He turned to Dominic with an expression that was neither surrender nor defeat but something harder to name—the acknowledgement of a man who had come to claim a grandson and found, instead, a family that had already formed around the child like a living thing, organic and imperfect and real. “We have conditions.”
“Name them.”
“We wish to see him. Regularly. Not letters sent across an ocean—visits. We shall take a house in York. Near enough for birthdays and Christmases, and all the ordinary days in between.”
“Agreed.”
“He will know us. He will know his parents’ stories—their childhood, their favourite songs. He will know where he comes from.”
