She braced for it.
Instead, he said, “I do not know how to do this, Lorraine.”
Her name—strained, unguarded—unsettled her more than any withdrawal could have.
“I know,” she said. “Neither do I.”
“They are good people. They will love him.”
“Yes.”
“And the law—”
“We have discussed the law.” She stepped closer—not touching, not here, but near enough that the space between them felt deliberate. “The law is not the only path. We agreed—we would speak to them. Show them what Thomas needs.”
“What Thomas needs,” Dominic said—and his voice fractured, barely perceptibly, on the boy’s name, “is a family. A real one. Not a duke who cannot look at him without seeing his dead father, and a governess who—”
He broke off.
The silence that followed was deafening.
“A governess who what?” Lorraine asked softly.
He shook his head. Pressed his fingers briefly to his eyes. When he lowered his hand, his expression had settled into something closed—not fully frozen, but perilously close.
“I need time,” he said. “To think.”
“Dominic—”
“Please.”
The word cost him. She saw it—in the tension in his shoulders, the rigid line of his hands, the swallow that worked in his throat. This was not retreat—not entirely. This was a man asking for the space to unravel where she could not see him do it.
She understood.
She did not like it—but she understood.
“Tomorrow,” she said. Not a plea. A promise. “We speak properly tomorrow. No distance. No titles. Only truth.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he inclined his head once and turned into his study. The door closed behind him with a quiet, decisive click.
Lorraine remained where she stood, her arms folded tightly about herself, listening to the silence settle.
Hold on, she thought—to him, to herself, to the fragile, impossible thing they had built in a cold house on the Yorkshire moors.Just hold on. We are not finished yet.
From the nursery above came the faint, tinkling melody of a small music box—something Mrs Potter must have found among the house’s forgotten things. Thomas was winding it again and again, the fragile tune drifting through the floorboards, offered up to the carved elephant now stationed beside Captain on the windowsill.
Lorraine leaned back against the wall, closed her eyes, and let the thin, wavering music carry her through the longest night of her life.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“You promised me tomorrow.”
Lorraine stood in the doorway of his study at nine in the morning, still in her teaching dress, her hair pinned with the ruthless efficiency that spoke of a restless night. Dominic recognised the signs, because he had not slept at all.
He had spent the night in the chair beside the dead fire, fully dressed, turning the situation over and over like a man examining a wound he already knew to be mortal. The brandy bottle sat untouched upon the desk—a small victory, though it felt like none.
He had reached his conclusion sometime toward dawn, when the grey light began to seep through the curtains and the house lay so still he could hear his own heartbeat.
