“We should very much like to meet Thomas,” Margaret said, mastering herself with visible effort. “Whenever he is ready. We would not wish to hurry him—we understand how strange this must be for him.”
“Thomas is in his room, preparing,” Dominic said. “Miss Weston will bring him down.”
Miss Weston.
Before the Hardings, the formality was proper—expected. Yet Lorraine heard the faint emphasis, the way he set the title between them like a boundary. She noted it, and said nothing.
“Of course,” she said. “I shall bring him at once.”
***
Thomas met his grandparents in the drawing room, with Lorraine beside him and Dominic positioned across the room, near the mantel.
The first moments were painful in the way only meetings between grieving strangers can be. Margaret could not stop looking at Thomas—at his brown eyes, William’s eyes, the last visible trace of the son she had lost from half a world away. Her hands trembled when she reached for him. Her voice faltered when she spoke his name.
Thomas held fast to Lorraine’s hand and submitted to the scrutiny with the composed wariness of a small diplomat at a foreign court.
“You have your father’s eyes,” Margaret said, her own filling again. “Did you know that?”
“Miss Weston told me so.” Thomas’s grip tightened on Lorraine’s fingers. “And His Grace said Papa was very brave.”
“He was.” Margaret’s voice fractured and rebuilt itself in the space of a single breath. “He was the bravest person I ever knew.”
“Mama was brave too,” Thomas said. “She was afraid sometimes, but His Grace once told me that doing what must be done, even when one is afraid, is what makes courage matter.”
Every eye in the room moved to Dominic. He stood perfectly still, his expression unreadable.
James Harding studied the Duke for a long moment—the appraising gaze of a man who had spent decades in the diplomatic service and knew the difference between what people said and what they meant. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy something, because his expression softened from formal gratitude into something more genuine.
“Thomas,” he said, turning back to the boy with the warmth of a grandfather who had rehearsed this moment across an ocean, “I have brought you something from India. Would you care to see it?”
Thomas glanced at Lorraine. She inclined her head. He released her hand—reluctantly, his fingers trailing across her palm as though reluctant to lose the contact—and crossed to James.
From his coat pocket, James produced a small wooden elephant, finely carved and polished to a soft, amber sheen.
“An elephant,” Thomas said, with due reverence.
“From a market in Calcutta. The man who sold it to me said that elephants never forget the people they love.” James’s voice remained steady, though his eyes shone. “I thought that rather fitting.”
Thomas turned the carving over in his hands, studying the curve of the trunk, the delicate shaping of the ears, the tiny, precise tusks. Then he looked up at James, his expression cautious—but not closed.
“Thank you,” he said. “I shall keep it with Captain.”
“Captain?”
“My wooden horse. His Grace gave it to me. It was his when he was small.” Thomas held the elephant up beside the compass at his chest. “Now Captain will have a friend.”
Margaret made a sound that hovered between laughter and tears. James blinked rapidly and cleared his throat. Lorraine pressed her knuckles lightly to her lips and looked away.
Dominic said nothing.
But Lorraine, who had spent months learning the language of his silences, saw the telltale signs: the tightening at his jaw, the strain along his throat, the subtle shift in his stance—the drawing-in, the straightening, the instinctive rehearsal of distance.
He is watching Thomas accept the elephant as he accepted the compass, she thought.With trust. With openness. With the willingness to let someone new matter.
And he was afraid.
Because if Thomas could welcome the Hardings, then the Hardings became real. The departure became real. The loss became real.
