Pembroke hesitated briefly before answering, “She believed you would revert to the man you were before if your marriage failed. She thought stability made you weaker, not stronger, and that removing it would restore what she considered your natural state.”
“Which is reckless. That is what everyone has always thought of me.”
“Yes,” Pembroke agreed. “In her view, that was preferable. Reckless men do not attach themselves to anything permanent, and they are less likely to be changed.”
Dorian looked down at the papers again, though his focus had clearly shifted beyond them. “And Holloway? Why would he do this?”
“He benefited from instability in your household and seems to have encouraged it whenever possible,” Pembroke explained. “It was about control and expectation. They both believed your marriage was the only thing preventing you from reverting to what you were before.”
Dorian’s fingers tightened briefly against the edge of the desk. “And they wanted it gone.”
“Yes,” Pembroke confirmed.
Dorian exhaled slowly, as though the conclusion had settled too firmly to push away. “Anne was not collateral damage.”
Pembroke did not answer immediately, and the pause itself carried more meaning than words.
Dorian pushed back slightly from the desk, the chair scraping softly as he stood. “She was the target,” he said.
“In part, yes.”
Dorian’s expression hardened. “In full.”
“I—Yes, Your Grace. Though I must say that, from what I have seen, they assumed you would break first.”
A short laugh escaped Dorian, though there was no humor in it. “I did,” he admitted quietly.
The admission settled into the room without resistance.
Pembroke did not interrupt him as he looked back down at the papers, though it was clear he was no longer reading them. When he spoke again, his voice was lower and more controlled, but something beneath it had shifted.
“She never needed to leave, and yet I gave her a reason to.”
This time, no one corrected him.
He remained standing in the study long after, the papers still spread across the desk, refusing to become distant, no matter how much he tried to separate himself from them.
Pembroke’s revelation should have sparked anger, clarity, something sharp enough to cut through what had happened. Instead, it settled into him in a way that felt heavier than rage.
Shame came first. Pembroke’s findings explained sabotage and manipulation that had poisoned the edges of his household, but they did not touch the moment that had mattered most to Anne. He was to blame for that.
He sat back down, one hand braced against the edge of the desk as though the room had tilted slightly beneath him.
Anne had not left because Lady Vivian had kissed him. She had left because he had hesitated when she needed certainty, and because that hesitation had confirmed every fear she had been trying to ignore.
The understanding landed, stripped of excuses, and it left him sitting with the uncomfortable clarity that Lady Vivian had not created the fracture, only pressed on something already weakened by his own fear.
Lily came back to him in fragments, not in the softened memory he sometimes allowed himself, but in the harsher truth of what he had become after losing her. He saw the years of avoiding attachment, the careful distance he had maintained from anything that might have mattered too much and therefore required him to risk loss again.
Anne had never been part of that avoidance. She had been the exception he had not known how to handle, and instead of stepping toward her when it mattered, he had stepped back.
Fear had not simply influenced him since Lily’s death. It had governed him, forcing his instincts into hesitation whenever something mattered enough to be lost.
And Anne had mattered more than anything.
He pushed himself up from the desk, and for a moment, he simply stood there. The decision did not arrive gradually. It arrived with a clarity that had been missing before, the understanding that if he allowed the distance to persist, it would become permanent in a way he would never be able to undo.
He walked out of the study and tore through the halls, ignoring the servants’ warnings about the weather. By the time he reached the stables, rain had already begun to fall heavily, the sky having broken open into something violent and unsteady.
