The words hung between them—fragile and immovable.
“I do love you,” Dominic said, and the admission stripped him bare. “That is why—”
“If the next words you speak are ‘that is why I must let you go,’ I will never forgive you.”
He closed his mouth.
Lorraine crossed the remaining distance between them. She stood before him—close enough that he could see everything she was refusing to hide: the anger, the grief, the love that made both unbearable.
“You have spent four years punishing yourself for three seconds in a Spanish ravine,” she said, her voice low and fierce. “And I have watched you—for three months I have watched you—climb out of that grave, inch by inch. I have watched you hold a child, admire a child’s painting, and love me as though the world might end.” She held his gaze. “Do not climb back in.”
He said nothing.
He had no words left. The careful argument lay in ruins, dismantled by a woman who fought not with logic, but with truth—and who knew every weakness in him, because he had shown them to her, willingly, in the dark, believing—foolishly—that such vulnerability was anything other than a loaded weapon aimed at his own chest.
“Tell me,” Lorraine said. “Say the words. Look at me and tell me it is over—and mean it.”
He looked at her. At the face he had committed to memory—the faint scatter of freckles, the storm-sea eyes, the stubborn set of her chin, the mouth he had kissed a thousand times and would have bartered his soul to kiss again. At the woman who had walked into his frozen house and refused to leave, who had coaxed speech from a silent child and tears from a silent man and hope from a place where it had lain dead for four years.
“It is over,” he said. “You should begin making arrangements to leave once the Hardings depart with Thomas.”
The words fell flat. Bloodless. The voice of a man who had severed something vital and was remaining upright only through sheer, stubborn refusal to collapse.
Lorraine absorbed it. He saw the impact move through her—the flinch she suppressed, the brightness in her eyes spilling over into a single tear that traced her cheek before she brushed it away.
“Do you know what William would say?” she asked quietly. “If he could see you now?”
Dominic’s chest tightened. “Do not.”
“He would say the same thing Julian said. The same thing I have said. The same thing Thomas says every time he takes your hand and asks you not to leave.” She stepped back. Drew herself up. Met his gaze with a steadiness that, for the first time, made him uneasy.
“You are a coward, Dominic Vane. Not because you froze in Spain. Not because you are afraid. But because you have two people who love you—who chose you, who stayed for you, who fought for you—and you are casting us aside because fighting for us is harder than losing us.” Her voice did not waver. “And I will not stand here and make it easy for you.”
She turned and walked out.
The door closed behind her. Not a slam—Lorraine Weston did not slam doors. A quiet, precise click that was somehow worse, because it sounded like finality.
Dominic stood in the silence of his study, surrounded by ledgers, unopened correspondence, and the crooked kestrel painting upon the wall, and felt the ice close over his head.
For the first time in months, it did not feel like safety.
It felt like drowning.
***
He did not leave the study for the remainder of the day.
Graves brought food he did not touch. Mrs Potter brought tea that went cold beside him. At some point in the afternoon, he heard Thomas’s voice in the corridor—
“Is His Grace busy? I wanted to show Grandmama my kestrel painting—”
—and Jenny’s gentle diversion, the small footsteps retreating, and the silence that followed was the precise, cutting silence of a man hearing the consequence of his own choices walking away in small shoes.
This is what you wanted, he told himself. A clean break. No conflict. No ugliness. Thomas will go with people who love him. Lorraine will find another position, another household, another life that does not include a man who destroys everything he touches. This is the responsible choice. The rational choice. The choice William would have—
He stopped.
Because the truth—the sharp, unignorable truth—was that William would not have made this choice.
