Until now.
“May I sit?” he asked.
James gestured to the chair opposite. Dominic complied. The chair, elegant and slight, creaked faintly beneath his weight, and he was dimly aware of the absurdity: a former rifle officer perched upon gilt furniture, about to plead for the right to raise a child he had once avoided.
“I owe you both an explanation,” he said. “And an apology.”
Margaret lowered her hoop. James set aside his pen.
“When you arrived,” Dominic began, “you might have had the impression that I was Thomas’s custodian. That his care had been an arrangement—a duty undertaken in William’s memory. That was not the truth.”
He paused. The word settled in the room like a stone dropped into still water, disturbing the careful surface of courtesy that had governed every interaction between them.
“Not an entirely unreasonable one,” he continued. “I might once have believed it myself. I had spent so long persuading myself that Thomas was an obligation—that keeping him fed and housed and educated was sufficient, that proximity without attachment was acceptable—that I had come to accept it as fact.” He looked at his hands—those revealing, traitorous hands—and deliberately unclenched them. “It was never true.”
“Your Grace—” Margaret began.
“Pray let me finish. I may not have the courage to say it twice.”
She fell silent. James’s attention sharpened.
“Thomas came to this house a few months ago, and I failed him. Thoroughly. Repeatedly. Without excuse. I could not look at him without seeing his father. I could not touch him without feeling the weight of what I owed and could never repay. I shut myself away, left his care to a governess who had known him less than a day, and told myself it was acceptable, because I was broken—and broken things ought not to be trusted with the living.”
The silence that followed was complete. Outside, a winter bird sang—bright and incongruous against the gravity of the moment.
“Miss Weston changed that.” His voice roughened slightly on her name. “She entered this house and refused to accept the man I had become. She taught Thomas to laugh again, to trust again—and, in doing so, she taught me that stillness is not the same as survival. She brought that boy back to life, and she brought me with him.”
He drew another breath.
“And somewhere in the midst of it, we became a family. Not in law. Not in form. But in truth. The kind that reads together by the fire, that hangs a child’s painting on the wall, that walks out to watch kestrels in the cold. The kind in which a child feels safe enough to weep—and a man safe enough to hold him.”
Margaret’s tears fell again, but differently now. Recognition, not grief.
“I consulted a barrister,” Dominic continued. “Before your arrival. He informed me that your claim is unassailable. That the law will support you, that I have no standing, and that any attempt to contest the matter would be long and damaging—most of all to Thomas.” He met James’s gaze. “He was correct about the law. He was wrong about the conclusion.”
James leaned forward slightly. “Go on.”
“I will not contest you in court. I will not subject Thomas to a dispute between barristers. That is neither what William would have wished, nor what Thomas deserves.”
“Then what do you propose?”
“I ask that you listen. Not to me—I have no claim—but to Thomas.”
Dominic rose and crossed to the window. The eastern ridge lay beyond, the folly faint against the winter sky.
“Thomas does not wish to go to India,” he said. “He told me so. He speaks plainly, without artifice, and he has told us all in the only way he knows how: with certainty.”
“Children do not always know what is best for them,” Margaret said softly.
“No. But they know where they feel safe. And Thomas feels safe here.” Dominic turned back. “Because of Miss Weston, who has been mother to him in all but name. Because of the household that has gathered around him. And—” he steadied himself, “—because of me. Not because I am equal to the task, but because I have made him promises, and I intend to keep them.”
A knock sounded.
“Come in,” James said.
Lorraine entered.
She was composed—outwardly Miss Weston, the capable governess—but Dominic saw the strain beneath it: the sleeplessness, the hope she held with such care.
