Chapter 40 Gabrielle
Gabrielle
Brooding.
There was no other word to describe Cal. He’d been this way since lunch. And I had no idea why.
Well, I had an idea. I just didn’t want to think about it. Which meant, of course, that I couldn’t think about anything else.
He sat slouched in the armchair of my bedroom, navy-and-burgundy dressing gown belted loosely around his waist, staring at the carpet. Or through it.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Why should anything be wrong?” he said flatly, never lifting his eyes.
I shook my head. “This is what you warned me about, isn’t it?”
He looked up, gray eyes dull, but said nothing.
“You’ve been here for two days. Two. And they’re already rubbing off on you. This doesn’t work if you shut me out.”
He dropped his gaze back to the carpet. “It’s not what you think.”
“Then fill me in. Because I just went from walking on clouds this morning to the most awkward day of my life. One minute, you’re asking me to marry you. The next, you go off with your family, and now you won’t look at me. I’m not an idiot, Cal.”
“It’s not you.”
“‘It’s not you, it’s me?’ Wow…” I flung myself back on my pillows and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve heard that line before, but I never thought I’d hear it from you.”
He stood and moved toward the bed. Bracing his hands on the footboard, he looked at me. The brooding was gone, replaced by pain rolling off him in waves.
I sat up and hugged my knees to my chest. “You told them, didn’t you? You told them you wanted to marry me, and they shot you down.”
“No,” he said softly.
“If you’re trying to spare my feelings, it’s not working.” I dropped my chin to my knee. “I was stupid to think I was good enough.”
“Damn it, Gabrielle! This isn’t about you.” His words hit like a slap. And they stung just as much.
I rolled onto my side, curling toward the window. Tears welled, hot and stinging. I blinked hard to hold them back, but it didn’t work. They spilled anyway.
I sucked in a shaky breath, trying to keep the tremors from my voice. “You should sleep in your own room tonight.” Another breath. “I’m tired.”
He didn’t argue. I heard him shuffle toward the door. The knob creaked. His voice—smooth but frigid—coasted across the room.
“Funny thing about Branleigh Park—it changes people. Seems neither of us is immune.” A beat. Then, clipped and formal, “Good night.”
The door clicked shut.
And the waterworks began. Sobs ripped through my chest. I smothered my face in the cool pillow—partly to muffle the sound, partly to press it all back down. Like that ever worked.
I’d told myself this was different. That we were different.
Maybe I had been a fool to believe that a man like him—thirteen years older, Oxford-educated, so sharp and sure and finished—could really want someone like me. A girl still trying to make sense of her life, her grief, her future.
He was an accomplished physicist, and if the universe was just, a breath away from tenure. I didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree yet. He had old money, old manners, and a name people recognized. I had student loans, a flimsy résumé, and a heart too easily handed over.
What had I actually thought would happen? That we’d somehow outrun the odds? That his family would raise their crystal glasses and toast the scandal? That I’d be enough?
It was stupid. I was stupid.
What was I even doing here? I didn’t belong in this house, in this family, in his world. Maybe I never had.
There was no version of this story where we belonged together. Not really.
And the worst part—the part that ached deepest—was that I still wanted him to come back. To walk through that door, lie down beside me, and say he didn’t mean it. That he was scared too. That he’d shut me out because that’s what he does when he’s hurting, not because he didn’t love me.
But the hallway was silent.
And I was curled in a strange bed, crying over a man who’d asked me to marry him that very morning…and walked out that night like I’d never mattered.
I don’t know how long I lay there—long enough that the sobs quieted to hiccups, and the hiccups faded to silence. My head throbbed, my throat burned, and my body ached from exhaustion.
I hated crying like this. Hated the mess of it. Hated that it always ended the same way—leaving me hollow, humiliated, alone.
A soft knock sounded at the door.
I stiffened, every nerve suddenly wide awake.
The door opened with the softest click. I didn’t move. I couldn’t.
“Gabrielle?”
A fresh wave of tears slid down my face and onto the pillow.
Cal’s voice came low and ragged, almost raw.
“I’m shit at this.” He let the words sit, wrecked and breathless.
“Not just relationships—all of it. I know I’ve made a mess of today.
I made a mess of everything after lunch.
I made a mess just now, and I don’t know how to…
” The bed shuddered a little as he sat down—not too close, but not far.
He let the silence spool out, the pause trembling with whatever it cost him to speak.
“James and I had a row. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.
It dredged up…so much old rot. All the things I thought I’d finally left behind.
” He let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh.
“And then there’s Father. He’s dying, Gabrielle.
Lung cancer. Maybe six months left, but that’s optimistic.
Apparently, everyone knew except me, and today he just…
” Cal trailed off, voice thin and stunned.
I rolled to face him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
I sat up. “No, I’m sorry your father is ill.” I folded my legs under me and dashed away the tears with the back of my hand. “I know better than most what that’s like.”
He hesitated, hands knotted tight in his lap. His voice, when it came, was smaller than I’d ever heard it, shorn of every armor. “I know you do.” He turned to me, and when his eyes met mine, his face fell. I’m sure I looked a wreck—eyes bloodshot, face blotchy.
Cal recoiled as if he’d been struck, his mouth folding into something raw and wordless.
The next instant, he gathered me, careful but urgent, as though I were a glass cracked at the base but not yet fully shattered.
My cheek found the warmth between his chest and shoulder, and he cradled me there, his palm cupping the crown of my head, thumb combing gentle paths in my hair.
“Don’t,” he murmured, the word a plea and a command and an apology all wound together. “Oh, love, don’t ever let me do this to you.”
I shook my head, but more tears leaked out, hotter for the embarrassment of them. He caught each one, stroking them away as if he could erase the evidence along with the wound.
“I never want to be the reason you cry,” he said, voice low but hard-edged with self-loathing.
He traced the curve of my jaw, the lines beneath my eyes.
“Please, Gabrielle—don’t let the rot of my family touch you.
Not like this.” His movements were desperate, almost frantic, as though he could paste me back together with sheer proximity.
“It’s the jet lag,” I blurted, forcing a laugh that faltered on the catch in my throat.
“And the stress. And the end of the semester. It’s a miracle I made it through customs without ugly-crying at some poor border agent.
” I sniffed, trying to find levity in the mess, but my voice sounded soft and pathetic, even to me.
Cal didn’t take the out. He kept stroking my hair, sweeping slow arcs from my temple to the nape of my neck. He tightened his hold and pulled me fully onto his lap, the dressing gown soft against my skin. Dark stubble dotted his jaw, and fine lines gathered at the corners of his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, and this time he winced, shutting his eyes as if the words themselves hurt.
“I thought your family convinced you I wasn’t good enough,” I said.
I heard the acid in it, the raw scrape of pride.
“That I was a phase, or an embarrassment, or something you’d regret later.
I thought you’d finally seen how stupid our relationship looks from the outside.
” I forced the words, because if I didn’t, I would shatter again. “If you want out, I won’t stop you.”
Cal drew a long, stuttering breath, his chest pushing into mine.
His voice, when it surfaced, was crisp as a starched shirt but shaded with disbelief.
“You are a prodigiously brilliant woman, and yet somehow you’ve arrived at the most daft conclusion imaginable.
Truly staggering work.” He said it like he’d stepped straight out of the House of Lords—vowels pure cut glass, diction so precise it could have been ironed.
But beneath the theatrical scorn was something else entirely—devotion, worn thin by fear.
The laugh that burst out of me started as a hiccup, then a tumble I was too spent to restrain. It felt new and fragile, trembling there in the hush. “Wow,” I managed, letting my head fall back. “You went full Downton Abbey on me.”
He rested his forehead against mine, eyes closed, a rueful smile curving at the edge of his mouth.
“You really think my family could change my mind about you?” He scoffed, and the warmth of him, the utter shock of his confession, was enough to start the tears again—except this time they tasted like relief.
“And, if you must know, they’ve never tried to dissuade me.
Even if they had, it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.
” Cal tightened his arm around my ribs, as if he needed the resistance to anchor the words.
“Because, truthfully, it’s the other way around.
I’m not good enough for you. I still don’t know why you bother with me. ”
I angled back, just enough to see his face—pale in the dim bedroom light.
He was smiling, but it was a smile folded in on itself, paper-thin and crushed at the edges.
I touched my fingertips to his jaw, let them follow the subtle graze of stubble to the hollow beneath his ear. “Now who’s being daft?”
He huffed a laugh, but the sound was more a shudder than anything, equal parts relief and defeat.
I nestled my cheek against his shoulder, letting the silence yawn between us until my pulse evened out and my breathing fell back into a slow, measured rhythm. “Thank you,” I said, so quiet it might have been a thought. “For coming back.”
“I never should have left,” he murmured, his voice vibrating beneath my ear.
I pressed my palm to the warmth of his chest, his muscles shifting restlessly, breath uneven beneath my hand, and I steadied myself against the uncertainty of what came next. “If you want to talk about your dad, I’m listening.”
“I wouldn’t know what to say.” He drew in a breath and continued before I could reply.
“It’s odd—I’m perfectly happy delving into string theory, complex quantum entanglement, or working out the mathematics of a universe with twenty dimensions.
But dying? A universally natural part of the human condition?
It doesn’t feel real yet. Or maybe it does, but the wrong parts do. ”
Cal’s words hovered there, thoughts unfinished. He held me as if I were the axis of his world and he wasn’t sure whether to spin or simply hang suspended.
I let the silence fill up with the sounds of his slow breaths and the muted tick of the ancient clock on the dresser.
The last time I’d felt this particular brand of ache, I was perched on the foot of my dad’s hospice bed, watching the shadows lengthen on the wall, waiting for a future to start that I couldn’t for the life of me imagine.
The awkwardness of impending loss was so specific—so metallic and cold—that it seemed to filter into the very air in the room.
I could almost taste it here now, in England, nestled against Cal’s ribcage.
“When my dad was nearing the end,” I finally said, “I didn’t think or act or feel like I thought I was supposed to. Cold as it is to say, I was ready for it all to be over so that I could finally move on. I mentioned that to the hospice chaplain, and his response has stayed with me to this day.”
“What was it?”
“He said, ‘In an abnormal situation, any response is normal.’” A beat. “That’s the only useful thing anybody ever told me.”
Cal didn’t answer. At least, not with words.
Instead, he kissed my forehead—gentle, reverent.
With a quiet exhale, he eased me off his lap and onto the bed, just long enough to shrug out of his dressing gown.
He slipped beneath the covers and drew me in, curling his body around mine with a tenderness that undid me all over again.
He reached across me and flipped off the lamp. Darkness swept in, soft and complete. The strength of his arms around my waist anchored me more than words ever could.
And in that silence, held tight against his chest, I finally let myself believe we were still us.