“If that is what you truly want,” she said, “then I will accept it.”
His head turned at last, his eyes meeting hers with a conflicted intensity. “But I must assume that you want children.”
“I do,” she admitted. “Or… I did.” She gave a small shrug. “But dreams can change. They often do.”
He exhaled sharply, a sound somewhere between a sigh and a scoff. “I can’t ask you to make that kind of sacrifice.”
“And if I want to?”
“This annulment,” he said, his tone becoming more formal, more distant, “would be the kindest thing I could offer you. I would establish a household for you, ensure you had everything you could want. Your own space. Your own life. Freedom.”
Her gaze didn’t waver. “Without you?”
He dropped his eyes. “You don’t want to be married to me. You think you do, but you don’t. The things I’ve done… the things I’ve become… they’ve darkened my soul.”
Without hesitation, she reached out and took his hand. To her relief, he didn’t pull away. “Then let me help you,” she said.
“No one can help me. I’m a lost cause.”
Her lips curled slightly. “That happens to be my specialty—lost causes.”
He glanced down at their entwined fingers. His voice dropped, more vulnerable than she’d ever heard it. “You want to know what happened... after they dragged me away with the dead.”
“I do.”
His shoulders stiffened before he began to speak, slowly, deliberately. “I woke up in a shallow grave. There were bodies all around me—my comrades. Friends I’d laughed with. Fought beside. Bled with. The smell…” He closed his eyes, jaw tightening. “It was thick with death. I had to claw my way to the surface.”
Dorothea’s hand gripped his more tightly. “How awful,” she whispered.
He nodded once, almost absently. “It took me days to find a British company. I wandered half-starved and disoriented, unsure if I was even alive or some ghost trapped in a nightmare.”
Her chest ached at the image of him, broken and alone, covered in the blood of his friends, staggering through the woods with nothing but sheer will keeping him upright.
“They arranged transport home,” he added. “But a part of me… a large part… wished I had never left that grave.”
Dorothea stepped closer, gently placing her free hand on his chest. “But you did come home. And that means something.”
He looked down at her, pain still etched in every line of his face. But in his eyes, there was something else now, too. It was faint, but it was there, nonetheless. Hope.
She held his gaze. “You are not as lost as you think you are, Dominic.” The words hung in the air between them like a fragile thread—tender, steady, and unmistakably sincere.
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Thea,” he said. “Truly, I do. But I can’t be the man you want. Not anymore.”
He stepped back, and with that single motion, he let go of her hand. The absence of his touch felt sudden, jarring, like a door closing in her face.
But Dorothea didn’t wilt under his retreat. Instead, she squared her shoulders. “I’m not ready to give up on you.”
Dominic didn’t respond at first. Instead, he walked slowly back to the chair near the bed and sank onto it. “I wish you would,” he murmured. “Because I gave up a long time ago.”
His eyes didn’t rise to meet hers this time. He stared into the dying fire, as though the glow in the hearth held something worth remembering—or forgetting.
“You should rest,” he added. “Your body’s still recovering.”
Dorothea remained standing for a moment, her fingers slowly curling into her palm where his had just been. The silence between them was heavy with all the things he couldn’t say, and all the things she wasn’t ready to stop hoping for.
With a heavy sigh, she turned and returned to the bed. But her gaze lingered on him a moment longer before she slipped beneath the blankets.
He might have given up.
