Chapter 19
Despite the clarity he had experienced, acting on it was a different matter, Thaddeus found. He had no idea where to begin. He’d become like a bear with a sore tooth—everyone had started avoiding him.
“You look like hell.”
Well, almost everyone. Julian Westcott stood in the doorway of Thaddeus’s study, his travelling coat still damp from the rain.
Thaddeus did not look up from the papers scattered across his desk.
Numbers swam before his eyes—estate accounts, investment reports, correspondence requiring responses he could not summon the focus to write.
Three days had passed since Oliver’s departure.
Three days since he had made the decision to do something to win Oliver and Maribel over, and three days since he had decidedly not acted on it.
“I was not aware you were expected,” he said.
“I wasn’t.” Julian crossed the room and dropped into the chair opposite the desk without invitation.
“Lady Eleanor sent word. She seemed to think I should know that your wife has taken residence with her again, and that Oliver has been sent to Ashford Academy.” He paused, his gaze sharp.
“She also mentioned that you appear to have lost your mind.”
“Lady Eleanor is out of line. Though I hear it is not new for her. She knows no bounds.”
“Is that so?” Julian leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Because from where I’m sitting, it appears you’ve managed to drive away both your wife and the child you swore to protect within the span of a fortnight. That strikes me as either madness or something worse.”
Thaddeus’s jaw tightened. He set down his pen with deliberate precision and finally met Julian’s eyes. His friend looked tired—the journey from London took four hours in good weather, longer in this rain—but there was no sympathy in his expression. No gentle understanding.
Good. Thaddeus did not deserve it.
“I… There is a… Perhaps it is better this way. Things were… easier before.”
“Before what?” Julian’s voice carried an edge Thaddeus rarely heard from him. “Before you accidentally revealed that you possess feelings? Before she glimpsed the terrifying possibility that you might actually need her?”
“Before it became worse.”
“Worse than what, exactly?” Julian gestured at the empty study, the silent house beyond.
“Worse than this? You’ve achieved precisely what you always wanted, Thaddeus.
Perfect isolation. Absolute control. No one left who might inconveniently care whether you live or die.
” He sat back, his expression hard. “Congratulations. How does it feel?”
Thaddeus looked away.
The rain lashed against the windows, blurring the view of the grounds beyond.
Somewhere out there lay the garden Maribel had restored.
He could not see it through the grey curtain of weather, but he knew it was there.
Blooming without witness. Beautiful and utterly pointless in a house where no one walked anymore.
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly.
“Then explain it to me.” Julian’s tone softened fractionally.
“Because I have known you for fifteen years, and I have watched you construct walls so high that even you cannot see over them anymore. I watched you inherit grief from your father and decide that the solution was to feel nothing. To need no one. To make yourself invulnerable by making yourself alone.” He leaned forward again.
“And now I’m watching you destroy the first real thing you’ve built since your mother died.
So please, Thaddeus. Help me understand what possible justification you have for this. ”
Thaddeus’s hands clenched on the armrests of his chair. His throat felt tight, his chest constricted. The urge to dismiss Julian, to order him from the study, to retreat into the cold silence that had always been his refuge—it rose in him like a familiar tide.
But he could not.
Because Julian was right.
And Thaddeus was so desperately tired of being wrong.
“I was afraid,” he said at last. The words emerged rough, barely audible.
“She was becoming... essential. Too important. Every morning I woke wondering if this would be the day something happened to her. Every time she left the house, I imagined accidents. Illness. The thousand ways one can lose someone without warning.” His voice cracked.
“I could not—I cannot—survive that again.”
“So you guaranteed it instead.”
It was true, and while he had admitted it silently to himself, it was a different matter to hear it so callously. Thaddeus flinched.
“You’ve spent your whole life preparing for loss,” Julian continued, his voice steady and unforgiving.
“Guarding against it. Building defences so elaborate that you convinced yourself they were strength rather than cowardice. And now you’ve ensured that the very thing you feared has come to pass.
Not through chance or tragedy or any force beyond your control.
But through your own deliberate choice.”
“I did not choose this.”
“Didn’t you?” Julian’s eyes bored into him.
“She asked you to love her. To trust her. To allow yourself to need her. And you refused because you have spent twenty years believing that needing anyone makes you weak. That vulnerability is failure. That the only way to survive is to keep everyone at arm’s length.
” He paused. “Tell me, Thaddeus. How is that working for you?”
Thaddeus could not answer. Could not form words around the truth lodged in his throat like broken glass.
The silence stretched between them, broken only by rain against the windows and the distant rumble of thunder.
Finally, Julian spoke again, and this time he sounded rather more sympathetic.
“She didn’t leave because you failed her. She left because you wouldn’t even try.”
The words struck with devastating accuracy. Thaddeus felt something inside him—some last bastion of defence—crumble entirely.
“I don’t know how,” he whispered.
“How to what?”
“How to...” He gestured helplessly. “How to be what she needs. What he needs. How to... feel these things without being consumed by them. My father—after my mother died, he—” His voice broke.
“I watched him fall apart. Watched grief destroy him so thoroughly that he might as well have died with her. And I swore I would never—I could not—”
“Your father loved your mother,” Julian said quietly.
“But he also pushed away everyone who tried to help him. He locked himself in grief the same way you’ve locked yourself in fear.
He wasn’t destroyed by loving her, Thaddeus.
He was destroyed by his refusal to let anyone else in after she was gone. ”
Thaddeus closed his eyes against the burn of tears. “I don’t know the difference.”
“Yes, you do. You just refuse to see it.” Julian rose and crossed to the window, staring out at the rain-soaked grounds.
“Love isn’t control. It’s risk, willingly taken.
It’s choosing to need someone even though you know—you absolutely know—that you could lose them.
And doing it anyway. Because the alternative.
..” He turned back. “The alternative is this. A perfectly maintained house with no one in it. A life so carefully ordered that it contains nothing worth living for.”
Thaddeus’s hands trembled. He pressed them flat against the desk to still them.
“The boy,” Julian said, his voice dropping. “Tell me about Oliver.”
“He is at school. As planned.”
“And do you know how he is doing?”
“I trust that he is... adjusting.”
“You do, do you?” Julian’s expression hardened again. “Because I stopped at Ashford on my way here. Spoke with the headmaster. Would you like to know what he told me?”
Thaddeus felt dread pool in his stomach. “Julian—”
“The boy doesn’t play. Doesn’t speak unless directly addressed.
Sits alone during meals, during recreation, during every moment he’s not required to be elsewhere.
” Julian’s voice remained level, but fury simmered beneath it.
“He asks for Maribel every single day. The staff have stopped answering because there’s nothing to tell him except that she’s gone and you sent him away. ”
It was exactly why he had not visited yet. It was all that he had been afraid of and Thaddeus could feel his throat closing up, until he could barely breathe.
“I had to explain to the headmaster that his guardian had abandoned him after the death of his parents.”
“That is not—I did not abandon—”
“What would you call it?” Julian’s control finally cracked, his voice rising.
“You drove away his aunt—the only family he has left—because you started caring for her. And before giving the boy a chance to grieve, you sent him to school. Did you truly send him because it was the only option for a proper education, or was it because you could not stand loving him either?”
“Stop.”
“No.” Julian strode back to the desk, his hands braced against the surface.
“You wanted to protect him. You told yourself everything you did was for his benefit. But look at what your protection has done. A five-year-old child sits in a dormitory fifty miles from here believing that everyone he loves disappears. That affection is temporary. That the adults responsible for him will inevitably abandon him.” His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper.
“You have taught him, Thaddeus, that love is loss. And he has learned that lesson so well that he has stopped trying to love anyone at all. Does that not sound rather familiar?”
Thaddeus felt his vision blur. The study seemed to tilt around him, the walls closing in.
“I wanted him safe.”
“From what? From caring? From being cared for?” Julian straightened. “He was safe, you fool. He had Maribel. He had you, when you chose to show up. He had the beginning of something that could have been a family. And you destroyed it because you couldn’t tolerate your own fear.”
Thaddeus closed his eyes against the verbal assault from his friends. He knew this, of course he did.
He had not been protecting Oliver. He had been protecting himself. He’d been selfish.
And in doing so, he had become the source of the very harm he claimed to prevent.
His breath came sharp and shallow. His hands shook. The careful composure he had maintained for three days splintered into pieces.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” he said. The words emerged broken. “I don’t know how to—Julian, I have destroyed everything. Everything. And I don’t know how to make it right.”
Julian studied him for a long moment. Then, slowly, his expression softened.
“Good.”
Thaddeus looked up, uncomprehending.
“That’s the first honest thing you’ve said in years,” Julian said quietly.
“You don’t know how to fix it. You don’t have a plan, a strategy, a carefully ordered approach that will restore everything to proper working order.
” He crossed to the door, then paused at the threshold.
“So perhaps it’s time to stop trying to control the outcome and simply do what you should have done from the beginning. ”
“Which is?”
“Tell your wife the truth. All of it. Without reservation or defence or any attempt to justify what you’ve done. And then...” Julian met his gaze steadily. “Then you let her decide whether you deserve a second chance.”
“And if she says no?”
“Then you live with the consequences of your choices. Like the rest of us.” Julian pulled open the door. “I’m returning to London tonight. I suggest you spend the time between now and then determining what kind of man you want to be. Because the one you’ve been is not working.”
He left without another word.
Thaddeus sat alone in the study as darkness gathered beyond the windows.
Julian’s words echoed in the silence, each one a small blade finding its mark with surgical precision. But beneath the pain, beneath the shame and the grief and the terrible clarity of everything he had destroyed, something else stirred.
Not hope, but perhaps the faint, fragile possibility of change.
He thought of his mother’s sitting room where he had wept three nights ago. Maribel had taken spaces consumed by grief and made them habitable again. Had shown him, without words, that healing was possible. That rooms sealed in darkness could be opened to light.
That walls built to protect could be taken down.
He thought of Oliver at Ashford. Sitting alone. Waiting for someone who would not come because Thaddeus had sent her away. Learning, day by day, that love meant loss and that the people who were supposed to care for him could not be trusted.
He thought of Maribel. Of the way she had looked at him as she left—not with anger, but with pity. The pity of someone who saw exactly what he was throwing away and knew he would regret it.
She had been right.
Thaddeus rose on unsteady legs and crossed to the window.
The rain had stopped. Pale moonlight broke through the clouds, illuminating the gardens below. And there, just visible in the silvered darkness, the roses bloomed along the stone wall.
Maribel’s garden. Maribel’s restoration. Evidence of what could be saved if someone was brave enough to try.
He pressed his palm against the cold glass.
For twenty years, he had believed that strength meant control. That safety lay in distance. That the way to survive loss was to refuse to love in the first place. And he had been irredeemably wrong.
The question was: could he learn to be different?
Could a man who had spent decades building walls learn to take them down? Could someone who had made himself invulnerable through isolation learn to risk vulnerability instead?
He did not know.
But standing in the empty study of his empty house, with nothing left to lose because he had already lost everything that mattered, Thaddeus Blackwood made a choice.
He would try.