Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
August groaned.
The sound escaped him before he could stop it, low and rough and entirely unbecoming of a duke.
He pressed his knuckles against his forehead and stared at the same paragraph he had been reading for the better part of twenty minutes.
The figures had not changed. The ink had not rearranged itself into something comprehensible.
And yet he could not, for the life of him, have told anyone what the paragraph said.
Three days. Three days since Eliza had left, and his mind had become utterly, maddeningly useless.
He pulled the ledger closer, as though proximity might force comprehension.
The study looked like a man losing a war with himself.
Papers fanned across the desk in overlapping layers, correspondence half answered, steward’s reports marked with notations that trailed off mid-sentence, a letter to his solicitor that began with confident authority and devolved into illegible scratching.
His cup of tea sat at the corner of the desk where Denton had placed it hours ago.
The surface had gone cold and still, a faint skin forming on top.
And the clock.
That damned grandfather clock in the corner had always ticked.
He knew this. It had ticked when his father used this study, had ticked through every meeting and every crisis and every quiet afternoon August had spent here since inheriting the title.
But it had never sounded like this. Never so loud, so insistent, each tick landing in the silence like a stone dropped into a well.
Because the silence was never this absolute.
He rubbed his temples with both hands, pressing hard enough to see sparks behind his closed lids. The quill clattered to the desk when he released it. He left it there.
The manor was quiet. Not peaceful—he had learned, in three days, that there was a vast and terrible difference between the two.
Peaceful was Eliza reading in the library while he worked.
Peaceful was the sound of her footsteps in the hallway, the knowledge that she was somewhere nearby, existing in the same space.
This was not peaceful. This was the absence of her, and it filled every room he entered like smoke.
Focus. You are a duke. Read the damned paragraph.
He tried. Got through the first line—quarterly rents from the eastern tenancies—and then her voice slipped in, unbidden and unwelcome and achingly clear.
“You cannot possibly eat that much marmalade and still call yourself civilized, August.”
Breakfast. A morning three weeks ago, perhaps four.
She had been sitting across from him with her tea, one eyebrow raised in that way she had—not quite mocking, not quite amused, something sharper and more dangerous than either.
He had responded with something clever, something designed to make her smile, and she had obliged him with a laugh she tried to hide behind her cup.
He could hear that laugh now. Could see the way her eyes had gone bright with it, the way her composure cracked just enough to reveal the woman beneath.
The woman who sat with your father in his final days. Who read to him when you could not bear to enter the room. Who held your mother’s hand at the funeral and never once asked for thanks.
August shoved back from the desk. The chair scraped against the floor with a sound that made him wince.
She had challenged him. That was the thing of it.
Every other person in his life—his sisters, his mother, the ton, his servants—let him charm his way through.
Let him smile and deflect and perform the version of himself that kept everyone comfortable.
Eliza had never allowed it. She saw through the performance with those penetrating gray eyes and refused to pretend she did not.
You use humor the way other men use armor, August. It is effective, I grant you. But it must be exhausting.
She had said that to him one evening in the library, apropos of nothing, as though she had been thinking it for weeks and simply decided it was time he heard it. He had laughed—what else could he do?—and changed the subject.
But she had been right. She was always right about the things he least wanted to hear.
August sat at the head of the long table, staring at the empty chair on his right.
He had asked Denton, weeks ago, to set Eliza’s place beside him rather than at the far end of the table. A small gesture. The sort of thing a husband might do when he wanted his wife close enough for conversation. Close enough to pass the salt.
His hand moved toward the salt cellar before he registered what he was doing. His fingers had nearly closed around it when he stopped.
It was already beside his plate.
Eliza would have done the same thing. Not because it was her duty or because she was managing the household with professional competence but because she paid attention.
Because she noticed the small things—the way he took his tea, the book he had been meaning to read, the tension in his shoulders after a long day—and responded without fanfare or expectation of gratitude.
She noticed him. Not the Duke. Not the title or the estate or the obligations that came with both. Him.
His hand hovered over the salt cellar for another breath. Then he withdrew it and placed it in his lap.
The roasted pheasant sat untouched on his plate. The potatoes cooled. The wine in his glass caught the candlelight, deep red and still.
He pushed back his chair and stood. The footman moved forward, but August waved him off.
“I find I am not hungry this evening.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
As August left the dining room, the sound of carriage wheels reached his ears. Eliza? He was sprinting into the front hall and opening the door himself before he could think better of it.
Instead of Eliza, his sister stood on the other side with her head cocked and an eyebrow raised.
April. Of course, it was she.
“What ever possessed you to open the door yourself?”
August straightened his waistcoat, ran a hand through his hair—which needed attention, he realized though he could not bring himself to care—and decided that he would be charming.
“I was simply eager to see you!”
“Oh, you must be very lonely, then.” She brushed past him into the hall then proceeded to the drawing room, leaving him no choice but to follow.
He would be easy and warm and perfectly himself, the way he always was with his sisters, and April would leave satisfied that all was well.
“April, you’re here in time for dinner. I was just—”
“Where is Eliza?”
The question landed like a slap.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Where is Eliza?” April did not move, nor did she smile. Neither did she soften the demand with any pleasantries. “I called at Aunt Martha’s yesterday, and she said Eliza had been with her for three days.”
The air left his lungs.
“Did you see Eliza?” The words came out before he could stop them, raw and unguarded, stripped of every layer of charm he had intended to deploy.
April’s eyes widened. Something shifted in her expression—surprise then understanding then a hardening that made her look unnervingly like their mother.
August caught himself. Straightened. Folded his hands behind his back in a posture that communicated ducal composure or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. “That is—I am glad to hear she is well. She mentioned visiting Lady Hartwell. A fortnight’s rest, she said.”
“I did not see Eliza, but Aunt Martha told me she has been staying with her.” April pulled at her bonnet ribbons, yanking the thing off her head and tossing it onto the nearest chair with a force that suggested the bonnet had personally offended her.
“Three days, August. She has been gone three days, and you are standing here looking like you have not slept or eaten since she left.”
“I have been occupied with estate business. The northern properties require—”
“Do not.” April pointed a finger at him. “Do not give me estate business. I grew up in this family. I know what estate business looks like, and it does not look like this.” She gestured at him—all of him, from his rumpled cravat to his hollow eyes. “Did you argue? What did you do to her, August?”
He bristled. His jaw tightened, and something hot flared in his chest. “Why must you assume I am the one at fault?”
“Because I know you. Because you have spent your entire life keeping everyone at arm’s length while pretending to let them close. Because Eliza is the most sensible woman I have ever met, and sensible women do not flee their homes at dawn without excellent reason.”
The words struck bone.
“It is a complicated matter,” he managed.
“Then uncomplicate it.”
“April—”
“She is my friend, August. She is my sister. And I will not stand by while you and your stubborn pride drive away the best thing that has ever happened to you.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, her chin raised, her blue eyes bright with the particular fury that only a younger sister could summon. Then she snatched her bonnet from the chair, jammed it back onto her head, and strode toward the door.
“Fix this,” she said over her shoulder. “Before it is too late.”
The front door opened and closed. The carriage wheels crunched on the gravel drive. And then silence, heavier than before, settled back over Wildmoore Hall like a shroud.
August moved to the window. The evening light was fading, turning the drive to gray and gold, and April’s carriage was already halfway to the gate. He watched it grow smaller, carrying his sister away from him and his mess.
His reflection stared back at him in the glass. Hollow-eyed. Haggard. A man who looked nothing like the Duke of Wildmoore and everything like someone who had lost something he did not know how to recover.
Fix this. Before it is too late.
He turned from the window and moved through the manor to the room he had avoided since Eliza left. Her sitting room. He had walked past the closed door a dozen times without stopping and allowing himself to enter the space where her absence would be most acute.
Now, his hand found the latch, and he pushed the door open.
The room smelled like her. Lavender and paper and something warm he had never been able to name.
Her writing desk sat beneath the window, its surface neat save for a few sheets of stationery and the inkwell she preferred—the blue one, not the black, because she said blue ink made correspondence feel less like obligation.
Her books lined the shelf by the fireplace. A shawl draped over the arm of her chair. A half-finished piece of embroidery lay on the side table, the needle still threaded, as though she had set it down intending to return in a moment.
She left it all behind. She left everything behind except what fit in one valise.
His gaze moved along the shelf and stopped.
The duck.
It was small—barely the size of his palm—carved from light wood and painted in cheerful, slightly uneven strokes. She had won it at the village fair two months ago, a ridiculous little thing.
August picked it up now. The paint was slightly chipped where the beak met the head, and one eye was larger than the other, giving it a permanently startled expression. It weighed almost nothing.
His throat closed.
He sank into her chair—her chair, the one he had refused to sit in when she was here because it was hers, and he respected that boundary even when he wanted to cross it—and held the duck between both hands.
I miss her.
The thought arrived without preamble or the careful scaffolding of logic and justification he usually constructed around his feelings. It was bare and brutal and entirely true.
Something cracked inside his chest. Not dramatically—he did not weep or cry out or pound his fists against the armrest. It was quieter than that. A fracture that ran deep, splitting open the carefully sealed compartment where he had stored everything he refused to feel.
His father’s death. The grief he had been too busy to process, too needed to indulge.
The loneliness that had been his constant companion since he was seventeen years old and took on the weight of an entire family without anyone asking if he could bear it.
The regret—God, the regret—for every moment he had chosen charm over honesty, deflection over vulnerability, performance over truth.
Eliza had offered him something real. And he had responded by accusing her of betrayal, by listening to her marriage described as a practical arrangement and letting the description stand, by being so terrified of needing someone that he had driven away the one person he actually needed.
The duck stared up at him with its lopsided eyes.
He closed his fingers around it and pressed his fist to his mouth. The room was silent around him, and he did not try to fill the silence with anything. He sat in it and let it hurt.
She deserved better than what he had given her. She deserved honesty, and he gave her performance.
August opened his hand and looked at the duck one more time. Then he set it carefully back on the shelf, exactly where she had placed it.
It was time to give Eliza the choice she truly wanted.