“The needle is stuck,” Thomas said without looking up. “It keeps pointing north. But north is not home.”
Dominic crossed to him and sat beside him on the bench. The cold bit through his clothes. He did not notice.
“Compasses always point north,” he said. “That is their purpose. Home is something else.”
“I already found it.” Thomas snapped the compass shut. “It is here. And everyone keeps trying to take me away from it.”
Dominic said nothing.
“Why don’t you want me?”
The question was quiet. Stripped bare.
“Thomas—”
“Grandmama wants me. She cries because I look like Papa. Grandpapa wants me. He brings me things and asks about my paintings.” Thomas turned thecompass over in his hands. “But you—you went away. You locked your study and Miss Weston has been upset and you told me you’d never leave and then you left.”
Each word struck clean and true.
“You promised,” Thomas said. “On my birthday.”
Dominic closed his eyes.
Behind them rose everything—the painting, the compass, Lorraine’s voice, William’s memory, the boy beside him, waiting.
You are a coward, Dominic Vane.
He opened his eyes.
“Thomas,” he said, and his voice was rough now, unsteady in a way it had not been for years. “I owe you an apology.”
Thomas looked at him. Watching.
“I went away because I was afraid. Not of you—never of you. Of losing you.” He drew a breath. “Your grandparents have a claim. The law says they may take you. And when I learned that, I did what I have done every time something has frightened me since Spain. I froze. I hid. I told myself I was protecting everyone, when in truth I was only protecting myself.”
Thomas listened, wholly still.
“Miss Weston called me a coward,” Dominic said. “She was right.”
Thomas considered this.
“Miss Weston does not say things she does not mean.”
“No. She does not.” Despite everything—the cold, the fear, the shattering weight of what he was about to do—Dominic almost smiled. “She is the most honest person I have ever known. And the bravest. Considerably braver than I am.”
“She said you were sad sometimes. That people who’ve lost things get afraid of losing more.” Thomas glanced at him sideways—the keen, measuring look of a child who understood loss far too well. “Are you afraid of losing me?”
“Terrified.”
The admission cost him nothing. That was the revelation—after weeks of rehearsed arguments and careful restraint, the truth required no effort at all. It was the pretending that had been exhausting. The silence. The ice.
“Then don’t let them take me.” Thomas’s voice was small, but resolute. “Fight for me. The way Papa would have.”
The words broke something open.
Not the slow thaw of recent weeks, not the small fractures of late-night confessions and tentative hope—but everything at once. The ice giving way. The flood rushing in. The feeling he had held back since a ravine in Spain, where he had frozen and twenty-one men had died, and he had decided—quietly, irrevocably—that he did not deserve to feel anything ever again.
Thomas was watching him. William’s eyes. William’s trust, offered once more in the form of a child who still believed.
