He didn’t answer right away. His silence wasn’t cruel—it was careful. Measured. “How you manage to compare that to me sharing this knowledge with you is almost comical. You’re clearly not in your right mind.”
Across the room, Lord Gooldwer stood silent, watching. Waiting.
“Then tell me why you didn’t tell me! Stop beating around the bush, Heath,” she exclaimed, voice nearing hysterics.
Heath’s voice came at last, low and steady. “Because you still had hope. You hoped your father didn’t abandon you, but he did. You were blind to it all. Blind to his vices. Blind to everything becauseyou love him. It’s not a bad thing. But it was clear you wouldn’t be able to stomach this information before I had it all in hand.”
Blanche’s breath caught. Her eyes shimmered, but she didn’t look away.
“He is not the man you remember him to be or think he is,” Heath continued. “He is a man who left and didn’t look back. Who gambled your future and drank the rest. Who’s gambled away what charity I afforded him as well, even now—he’s already said as much—that he’s here hoping to leave with more funds.”
Blanche didn’t deny it. Her eyes didn’t leave her father’s. “He’s still my father,” she said. Her voice was quiet. Steady. But not unshaken.
Heath nodded once. “And I never took that from you.Hedid.”
She looked at him then—not with anger, but with something far more fragile: disappointment. Not in who he was, but in what he hadn’t shared.
She had trusted him with her grief. And he had held it for safekeeping. But her anger wasn’t misplaced.
And now, she didn’t know what to do with the space that had opened between them. Not a chasm. Not yet. But a crack, a hairline, was growing quickly out of his control. He needed to get a hold of this situation. He needed to set it all right… as planned.
Heath stepped forward then, his jaw clenched. “And you defend him like he’s done you no harm.”
“That’s not fair?—”
“It’s true.” It stung. Because she knew Heath didn’t speak to wound her. He spoke to hold the ground that was slipping out from under all of them.
Lord Gooldwer touched her shoulder gently, with a hand that once used to cradle storybooks and braid ribbons. “You don’t have to decide anything now,” he said softly. “Come home with me, just for a few days. We’ll talk to Fanny. To your mother. Set things right.”
Home.It didn’t feel like the word it once was.
But the part of her that still remembered warm bread and garden walks and sitting too long by the parlor fire nodded before her reason could intervene.
She heard Heath’s breath catch. “Blanche.” His voice was low. “You’re going with him?”
She turned too quickly. “I just… I need time. I need to be with my family.”
The silence that followed felt unnatural, and only then did she realize what she’d said.
She met Heath’s eyes—his expression unreadable—but she saw it there, beneath the calm: the wound her words had drawn.
“That isn’t what I meant…” she said, quietly. But the ache had already taken root.
He said nothing, and she had no salve for silence.
Heath reached for her hand—just barely—and she pulled it back, not out of malice, but because she didn’t know what was hers anymore.
“I have to go,” she said. Her throat closed around the words. “Please understand.”
She turned, took three steps… Stopped.
And when she faced him again, her voice trembled—not with tears, but with something colder.
“You’re angry with him for keeping the truth from me.” She met his gaze. “But you did, too… How would you feel, Your Grace, if someone had known something vital about your parents—something that could’ve changed how you remembered them, how you grieved them—and chose to keep it from you?”
The words hung in the air like smoke—less an accusation than a wound she hadn’t meant to expose, but couldn’t ignore.
And she walked away before she could watch them take hold.
