Chapter 26
Ashford Hall no longer felt the same.
Dorian noticed it in the smallest ways first. The corridors seemed longer. The mornings were quieter. Even the stablehands spoke more softly around him.
He told himself he would carry on as usual, as though nothing had happened at all. But he was not successful in such an endeavor.
Work piled up on his desk, becoming nothing more than papers he had read twice without retaining their meaning.
He moved through the estate, but he was simply following a routine he no longer wanted to have, pausing occasionally in places Anne would have passed through, only to realize how often that happened when she was there.
“What happened between the two of you?” the housekeeper asked him as soon as he was settled in his study.
“Nothing that I wish to discuss. I dare not even think about it. It is going to make me unwell.”
“Then that is all the more reason why you should think about it.” She approached him then, and though he did not wish to hear what she had to say, he knew that he needed it. “Whatever it is, I hope that you find it in you to fix it.”
“How do you know that it is something I broke?”
“Because Her Grace would only leave if she were given no other choice. She is clearly devoted to you, Your Grace. Anyone can see that.” Then she left.
As the morning passed, the silence became worse, and no matter how firmly he told himself it was the right outcome, it only felt the opposite.
The stables felt wrong before he even stepped fully inside them. It was not disorder in the obvious sense, not neglect or carelessness that could be immediately rectified, but the rhythm was off.
The usual confidence that the staff possessed had been replaced by hesitation, as though everyone working there was unconsciously waiting for someone to confirm what they already knew how to do. Dorian noticed it within moments of entering.
A stablehand moved past him, leading a horse that should have already been groomed, the tack slightly askew in a way Anne would have corrected without hesitation. Another pair argued quietly near the feed store, their disagreement unresolved rather than efficiently settled.
“Where is the morning schedule?” Dorian asked.
A young stablehand straightened immediately, though his answer came with uncertainty. “We are sticking to yesterday’s rotation, Your Grace.”
Dorian frowned slightly. “Why would you do that?”
“It was not updated,” the man said, then hesitated. “Her Grace usually adjusts it herself if there are changes. We thought… We assumed it would stay the same.”
The words landed with more weight than they should have.
Dorian walked further inside, scanning the space more carefully. It was not incompetence, not as far as he was concerned, but the absence of refinement in decision-making, the small adjustments Anne had made without ever announcing them.
He had not noticed how often she intervened in things that others considered finished, how she corrected problems before they became visible, and how, thanks to her, everything felt settled without effort on his part.
A second stablehand approached cautiously.
“The feed ratios are also slightly inconsistent,” he said. “We were not sure if Her Grace had made changes before she left.”
“She did not leave instructions?” Dorian asked.
“No, Your Grace. Only the usual notes. She usually explains things in person when she adjusts them.”
Dorian turned away, moving deeper into the stables, where Tempest was being tended to.
Even there, the difference was visible. The horse was being cared for correctly, but without the quiet assurance that usually surrounded Anne, he was clearly unhappy.
The subtle confidence that had once made every movement around the animal certain was gone, replaced by careful guessing and repeated checking.
“It is quieter without her,” one of the senior stablehands spoke reluctantly as Dorian passed.
He stopped. “Quieter?” he repeated.
The stablehand nodded once. “She always knew what needed to be done before we asked. Now we ask each other instead, and since nobody knows what is best like she did, we are all guessing, so there is no real need to communicate at all.”
Dorian did not say anything further because the truth was already visible everywhere he looked. Nothing was collapsing, but nothing was quite working either.
Not for the first time, he was forced to understand that Anne had not only belonged in his life, but she had also been holding parts of it together in ways he had never bothered to see.
He did not expect Tristan to arrive angry. He expected judgment, certainly. Confusion, perhaps, or distance, but not fury.
Tristan found him in the study, not bothering with a greeting, closing the door behind him with more force than necessary.
“You let her leave,” he accused.
Dorian did not look up from the desk. “She chose to.”
Tristan gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “That is what you are calling it.”
Dorian set the paper down carefully, as though sudden movement might undo his already fragile composure. “I did not force her.”
“You did not stop her either, which makes you just as culpable.”
Dorian’s voice stayed even. “She was hurt. I let her do what she thought was best for her while making my own preference known. What more could I have done?”
“She was in love,” Tristan snapped. “And you treated it like something you had to protect her from instead of something you were allowed to have.”
“You do not understand.”
“No, I understand perfectly. You decided you were a liability instead of a husband. You convinced yourself she deserved a life without you in it, so you gave her exactly that.”
Dorian’s jaw tightened. “That is not what happened.”
“Then tell me what did,” Tristan demanded.
Dorian did not answer immediately, and that hesitation was enough. Tristan exhaled sharply.
He wished that he did not have a friend who understood him as well as Tristan did.
“You love her,” Tristan said, his voice quieter. “And the moment you realized it, you started preparing to ruin it before she could do it for you.”
Dorian looked away.
That small movement told his friend everything. It was not Lady Vivian who destroyed his marriage. He was entirely at fault, regardless of what she had done.
The revelation came once again later that evening in the study when Mr. Pembroke arrived, carrying a folded stack of papers that looked deceptively ordinary until he placed them on the desk.
Dorian barely looked up at first, still working through correspondence that no longer seemed to hold his attention properly, until Pembroke spoke in a voice that cut through the room more sharply than usual.
“I have news regarding Lady Vivian.”
“I do not wish to hear it. She has done enough.”
“Your Grace, I had someone trace correspondence linked to Lady Vivian and Mr. Holloway,” he said.
Dorian paused, his gaze lifting as he set the papers aside.
“That is not a pairing I wish to know about,” he replied. “You have named a lady who has done everything in her power to ruin my marriage and a man who forced my wife to marry me in the first place. I do not care what the two of them have to say to one another.”
“You will when you hear what I learned.”
Dorian leaned back slightly, studying him with sharper focus. “Very well. Explain.”
Pembroke exhaled once before sliding the first page forward.
“They have been exchanging letters for months, letters that are disguised as social correspondence. Meetings were arranged indirectly, and visits were coordinated to appear coincidental, with enough consistency to suggest planning rather than mere chance.”
“Planning for what exactly?”
“Rumors about you, about Her Grace, and about the stability of your marriage from the moment it began.”
“Yes, well, mere rumors are hardly evidence of any conspiracy.”
“It is not only that,” Pembroke said, sliding another page forward.
“Sabotage has certainly occurred at the stables, specifically the contamination of Tempest’s feed.
The timing aligns with someone who knew the horse’s routine and feeding schedule in detail.
It could not have been anyone else, unless you were to accuse your own staff or Her Grace. ”
Dorian’s hand froze as his eyes fixed on the page.
Pembroke continued without pressing too hard. “There is also evidence of a coordinated influence within the racing circles—conversations that began sowing doubts about your estate’s stability. Those doubts did not appear organically. They were encouraged.”
Dorian looked up slowly. He did not care about the effect on the estate half as much as he did about Tempest’s health. He had not forgotten the way Anne looked when Tempest had taken ill, and he doubted that he ever would.
“Are you telling me that Lady Vivian arranged for my horse to be harmed?”
“I am telling you that she had both the motive and the opportunity, and that Holloway seems to have assisted her,” Pembroke replied somberly.
The room fell into a heavier silence as Dorian processed the revelation. When he finally did, his voice was quieter.
“Why would she do this?”
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.
No one stopped him when he took Tempest out.
The storm had fully broken by the time he left the estate, wind driving the rain hard enough to blur the world ahead into indistinct shapes. The ride to Rosemere House quickly became difficult, but that was not going to stop him. Nothing was going to stop him.
Anne’s face stayed with him throughout, not as an idealized version of what he wanted, but as she had been in the doorway, shattered and searching for the certainty he had failed to give her quickly.
That image did not weaken his resolve. It sharpened it.
For the first time since Lily’s death, he understood that losing someone did not happen only because of tragedy.
It also happened when someone was too afraid to say what they truly wanted, and when they were more willing to lose everything that mattered to them than risk what they wanted being the first to walk away.
And he had already done enough of that.
By the time Rosemere House appeared through the rain, Dorian was soaked through and breathless from more than the storm.
He did not slow down when he reached the gates.
He did not wait for permission or for his arrival to be announced.
He rode straight toward the house with the certainty that if he hesitated again, even for a moment, he would lose Anne forever.
This time, he would choose differently, even if it cost him everything he had.