Chapter 20 #2
For several minutes, the dining hall was silent.
Rowan watched them and felt a wave of nausea.
None of them lifted a fork to their mouths.
Anthony pushed a carrot from one side of his plate to the other.
Daniel traced patterns in his potatoes. Brook simply stared at his water goblet as if he were trying to disappear into the glass.
The fury Rowan had felt earlier began to evaporate, leaving behind a cold, crushing exhaustion.
He looked at the empty seat where Lucy should have been, the seat she had occupied with such vibrant, stubborn life, and realized that the order he had tried to restore was actually just a slow death.
He was tired of the coldness. Frustrated.
He dropped his linen napkin onto the table and leaned forward, his voice cracking the silence.
“Stop it,” he said, though the command lacked its usual bite.
The boys didn’t look up.
“Look at me. All of you.”
Reluctantly, three pairs of eyes lifted to meet his. The raw hurt reflected in them was a mirror of his own soul, and it was more than he could bear. Rowan let out a long, shuddering breath, his shoulders finally sagging.
“I am sorry,” he said, the words feeling foreign and heavy on his tongue.
The boys froze. Anthony’s fork hit the porcelain with a sharp ping.
“I am sorry for the way I have handled everything,” Rowan continued, his voice low and thick with an emotion he had spent years trying to bury.
“From the very moment that your mother passed away. I didn’t handle things as I should.
I didn’t take your feelings into consideration. ”
Rowan sat back and swallowed.
“I thought that by sending Miss Crampton away, I was protecting you,” he paused, realizing that that wasn’t the entire truth. “I thought I was protecting her. You all might want Lucy as your mother, but we have to consider her feelings, too, and what she truly wants.”
He looked specifically at Brook, whose lip began to tremble.
The honesty of his confession seemed to hang in the air, stripping away the untouchable veneer of the Duke and leaving only a father who was failing.
The silence was broken by a sudden, choked sob. Daniel, usually the most cheerful of the three, shoved his chair back. He didn’t run away like Rowan expected him to. Instead, he stumbled toward the head of the table, his small face flushed and wet with tears.
“I love you, Papa,” Daniel wailed, throwing his arms around Rowan’s waist and burying his face in his father’s coat.
The boy’s small frame shook with the force of his grief.
“I love you so much, but I just really miss her, and I don’t know what to say.
Everything feels wrong. It’s too quiet without her. Why did she have to go?”
Rowan froze for a heartbeat, his arms hovering in shock before he pulled his son close, tucking Daniel’s head under his chin. He felt the dampness of the boy's tears soaking into his waistcoat.
“She made the house loud,” Brook whispered, his voice small and fragile. “She made it feel like a home. Even when she was scolding me for my tricks, she was still nice to me.”
Rowan tightened his grip on Daniel, his heart aching with a physical pressure that made it hard to breathe.
Anthony and Brook slowly rose from their chairs, drawn by the rare sight of their father’s vulnerability.
They moved toward him until the three of them were clustered around the head of the table.
“We miss her too, Father,” Anthony said. “I’m trying not be sad all the time, but I really am.”
Brook stood at Rowan's elbow. He looked up, his eyes searching Rowan’s face with a frightening intensity. “Was it because you did not love her? Is that why she had to go?”
The question hit Rowan with the force of a physical blow. The word love felt like a heavy, forbidden weight. He looked at the three faces waiting for his answer, and he realized then that lying to them was no longer an option.
“That’s the opposite of the truth, Brook.”
“The opposite?” Anthony chimed in.
“Yes,” Rowan admitted and exhaled immediately.
“I think what I feel for her is love. It is unlike anything I have felt before, and it hurts, but the idea of it working out feels so good, it must be love. I love her more than I have the right to. But loving her doesn’t give me the right to cage her.
I cannot make her stay if she doesn’t want this life, if she doesn’t want me. ”
“But she seemed happy here,” Anthony countered, his brow furrowing. “She didn’t look like a prisoner. She looked like she belonged.”
Brook let out a frustrated, watery huff, crossing his arms over his chest. “Maybe she was just too scared to say it to you! You’re the Duke.
You walk around with your eyebrows all bunched up, and you roar at everyone.
A lot of people find you fearsome, Father.
You probably just scared her away because you’re so. .. so grumpy.”
A ghost of a sad smile touched Rowan’s lips as he smoothed Daniel’s hair. He thought of Lucy standing her ground in his study, her eyes flashing with fire as she challenged his every decree. He thought of her orchestrating a haunting right under his nose and looking him in the eye while she did it.
“No, Brook,” Rowan murmured, his voice softening. “She was never afraid of me. Not even when she should have been. She was the only person in this world who looked past the title and saw the man, and she wasn’t intimidated by either.”
“Then if she wasn’t scared...” Brook pressed. “... and you love her, why did she get in her carriage, going away from us? You’re a Duke; can’t you just go get her?”
“She blushes,” Rowan added suddenly, his eyes bright with a sudden realization. “Whenever you walked into the library to check on me, she would look down at her papers, but her cheeks would turn the color of the roses in the garden. I saw it. Twice.”
Rowan looked at his oldest son, stunned. The idea felt like a lightning strike in the middle of a winter storm.
“Also, when we talk about you, she only says nice things,” Daniel muffled against Rowan’s chest. “Even when we complain.”
Rowan felt a sudden, sharp jolt of hope, a sensation so unfamiliar it almost felt like pain. He closed his eyes for a brief second, his mind racing.
He paused to think about it. If she were merely a matchmaker finishing a job, she wouldn’t have blushed so much that even his little boys noticed.
She wouldn’t have looked at him with that fierce, watery defiance.
He realized with a sinking gut that he had played right into her hands.
She had offered him a mask of indifference, and he, in his fear of being unwanted, had accepted it as the truth.
He had to find her.
“I made a mistake,” Rowan whispered, the admission finally breaking through his pride. “I think I might have acted too rashly.”