“I am not angry.” She turned then, and her expression confirmed it. Not anger. Something more dangerous. Resignation. The look of a woman who had seen this pattern before and found no surprise in it. “I knew this would happen. The moment you read that letter, you went straight back behind the ice. I could feel it, even through the door.”
“I was trying to protect—”
“Do not.” The word was quiet, but absolute. “Do not tell me you were protecting me. Or Thomas. You were protecting yourself. That is what you do, and I understand it—I truly do—but you promised. You looked me in the eye and told me we would face whatever came next. And some days later, you placed a door between us.”
He absorbed the blow. He had earned it.
“You are right,” he said.
Something in her posture shifted—surprise, perhaps, at the absence of resistance.
“The letter frightened me,” he continued. “Not the Hardings. Not the logistics. The ending. I could see it—Thomas leaving, you leaving, this house returning to its former silence—and instead of telling you, I—”
“Froze.”
“Yes.”
She crossed the room and stopped a pace from him. Close enough that he could see the faint shadows beneath her eyes—three nights had marked her too—and the determined set of her jaw that meant her mind was made.
“Mid-February,” she said.
“Mid-February.”
“Then we have the weeks till then to find a way. Together. Not you alone in your study with a bottle of brandy, deciding what I may or may not bear.” Her chin lifted. “I am not fragile, Dominic. I survived the scandal. I survived my father’s death. I survived three years of being no one, belonging nowhere, mattering to no one. I can endure a ticking clock. What I cannot endure is being shut out by you.”
He reached for her—slowly, allowing her the choice—and when she did not refuse, he drew her against him and held her with fierce, unguarded relief.
“I am sorry,” he said into her hair. “I am sorry. It will not happen again.”
“It will,” she replied, her voice muffled against his coat. “You are who you are. But next time, I shall pick the lock.”
A breath of laughter broke from him—rough, unsteady, more relief than mirth—and he pressed his lips to the crown of her head.
Mid-February. The clock had begun its count. The ship was already at sea. The ending was coming, as certain as winter.
But Lorraine stood within his arms, and the crooked painting upon his study wall burned with impossible colour, and somewhere above them a boy slept soundly, trusting in promises that had yet to be tested.
He had mere weeks to keep that promise. To find a way. To prove himself worthy of the faith two people had placed in him despite every reason not to.
He meant to use every hour.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lorraine’s embroidery lay neglected in her lap.
She had taken it up to occupy her hands, but the needle had stilled long ago. She stared instead into the fire, watching the flames blur and reform, as though they might yield some answer if she looked long enough.
Four weeks.
Perhaps five. Perhaps six, if she were very fortunate—and very selfish—and willing to pray for foul weather in the Indian Ocean.
She was willing.
She had discovered, in the weeks since the letter’s arrival, that she was willing to do a great many things she would once have considered beneath her—bargain with fate, count days on her fingers like a child awaiting Christmas, lie awake calculating distances across oceans as though arithmetic alone might slow the passage of time.
So this is what desperation looks like on a sensible woman,she thought.Embroidery and nautical arithmetic.
The door opened.
