“You have not failed Thomas. You are trying—”
“Trying isn’t enough.” His voice broke. He had not meant to say it—not meant to open himself like this—but the words kept coming, as though something long sealed had split at last. “Four years I’ve been trying to put myself back together, and I am still broken. Still frozen. I watch you with him—watch you give him what he needs so easily, so naturally—and I think, that is what he deserves. That is what William would have wanted for him. Not me. Not—this shadow of a man.”
“Dominic.”
His name in her voice stopped him. She had come closer without his noticing—close enough that he could see the fine mist caught in her hair, the faint scatter of freckles across her nose.
“You are not that,” she said, the force of it quiet but unyielding. “You are a man who survived something terrible. A man who is still surviving, every day. That requires strength.”
“It does not feel like strength.” He gave a short, strained breath. “It feels like cowardice. Hiding. Keeping everyone at a distance—”
“And yet here you are.” Her gaze held his. “Walking with me. Speaking to me. Saying things you have never said aloud. That is not cowardice, Dominic. That is courage.”
He stared at her. The wind moved sharply around them, but he barely felt it.
“You see too much,” he said, hoarse. “You have from the first. From the moment you looked at me as though you could see straight through me.”
“I did not see what you think.” Her voice softened, though the steadiness remained. “I saw pain. Loneliness. A man who had forgotten how to let himself be human.”
She lifted her hand—then paused, the gesture arrested in the space between them.
“I still see all of that,” she went on quietly. “But I see something else as well. Someone who is learning to remember. And that, Your Grace, is no small thing.”
Her hand fell back to her side.
The moment passed, leaving Dominic breathless, with the distinct, aching sense of something almost—almost—reached.
“We should return,” Lorraine said after a moment. Her voice was not entirely steady. “The day is drawing in. Thomas will wonder where I am.”
“Yes.” He did not move. “Yes.”
Still, neither of them turned.
“Lorraine.”
Her name felt unfamiliar on his tongue—too intimate, too deliberate.
“I do not know what I am doing,” he said. “I do not know how to be what you—what anyone—” He broke off, frustration tightening his voice. “I am not good at this.”
“Neither am I.” She smiled, and there was something fragile in it, something that echoed the rawness in him. “I have spent years convincing myself I need no one. That it is safer that way.”
“Is it?”
“I thought so. Once.”
“And now?”
She met his gaze. The moor stretched behind her, vast and colourless beneath the lowering sky, the wind tugging at her cloak.
“Now I am not certain,” she said softly. “Now I think perhaps safety is overrated.”
They turned back toward the house.
The path narrowed as it re-entered the trees, forcing them into a single file before widening again. When they fell into step once more, their arms brushed—wool against wool—and neither drew away.
The contact was slight. Accidental. Nothing that could not be explained.
And yet Dominic felt it with a clarity that startled him—the awareness of her nearness, the quiet warmth of her presence against the cold air, the rhythm of her steps beside his.
