“He should. He deserves every part of them you can give him.”
“And when he is older—twelve, perhaps, or thirteen—if he wishes to visit India, to see where his father lived, you will not stand in his way.”
“I will encourage it.”
James studied him for a long moment. Then he extended his hand—not the formal courtesy of their first meeting, but the firm, personal clasp of a man concluding an agreement of far greater consequence than any he had brokered in his professional life.
Dominic took it.
Margaret rose from her chair, crossed the room, and did something Dominic did not expect. She put her arms around him. The embrace was brief, fierce, and not without strength—the embrace of a grandmother who had prepared herself for a battle and had instead found a man she could trust.
“Take care of him,” she whispered.
“I will.”
She released him, dabbed at her eyes, and turned to Lorraine, who stood by the door with tears upon her cheeks and a smile so radiant it seemed to alter the very light in the room.
“Come here, my dear,” Margaret said, opening her arms.
Lorraine went to her.
Dominic stood in the blue guest room, watching the two women embrace and felt, for the first time since a ravine in Spain, the full weight of being alive. Not the muted, frozen half-life he had endured for four years, but the real thing—messy, painful, overwhelming, magnificent.
He was going to marry Lorraine Weston. He was going to raise William’s son. He was going to fill Rovewood Hall with paint-stained fingers, crooked kestrels, and laughter that reached into every corner of the house.
He was going to live.
The thought was terrifying.
It was also, he found, the only one worth having.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
She was staring at the trunk.
It sat at the foot of the bed, dragged out from beneath it and left unopened, its scratched brass latches catching the late afternoon light. She had taken it out some time ago—she could not now remember when—and then done nothing further. It remained where she had placed it: not a decision, not yet an action, but a possibility made visible.
Lorraine stood beside it, her hands loosely clasped, and thought.
Four hours.
Four hours since the scene in the blue guest room. Four hours since Dominic had stood before the Hardings and spoken with a clarity and certainty she had never heard from him before—had claimed Thomas, had claimed a future, had said the word marry as though it did not terrify him.
He had meant it.
She knew he had meant it.
And yet—
He had not come.
Lorraine drew a slow breath.
It was not doubt, precisely. Not of him. Not of what he felt.
It was the absence of something else. Something quieter. More necessary.
He had said the words where they were required—before the Hardings, where they carried weight, where they altered the outcome, where they secured Thomas’s future.
