Chapter 8 Privileged Information #2
He glances at the faint steam curling from his cup. Before her. Before someone made him want to be something better.
The guilt slides in uninvited. Because even now, sitting here as the picture of civility, he’s lying again. Polite lies, but lies all the same.
He wonders how long before Lila notices. Before she realizes some parts of him never changed—the ones that know how to reshape truth, to withhold it just enough to protect someone, to make dishonesty sound merciful.
Theo lifts his cup, inhales the faint floral note. He takes another sip of tea to drown the thought. “This is good,” he says, meaning it.
She looks at him for a beat. “One of Victoria’s blends. She swore no store-bought tea could match her own.” Evelyn pauses, eyes softening. “I’m inclined to agree. I’ll be sad when it runs out.”
She stirs once, then lets the spoon rest. The silence that follows stretches.
“She was brilliant, you know,” Evelyn says finally, gaze fixed on the amber swirl in her cup. “Victoria. But she had a tendency toward excess. Obsession, really. She’d sit right there”—she gestures to the opposite chair—“for hours on end, reading old letters and thumbing through antiquity ledgers.”
Her words carry no venom, but no warmth either. Just a weary acceptance.
“She liked to think of herself as the family historian,” Evelyn says after a pause, the words careful. “But she wasn’t always kind in her interpretations.”
She holds his gaze. “She was always very interested in where the family’s wealth came from. And where it was going. I sometimes thought she cared less about family history than about what it might still be worth if Peter would just give her access to it.”
Theo notes the way Evelyn’s fingers tighten slightly around her cup before relaxing again.
He nods, swirling his tea as if weighing the taste rather than her words. “Did she ever find what she was looking for?”
Evelyn is silent for a beat too long. “If she did, she took it with her. But she kept meticulous notes. Boxes of them. Diaries, wills. The woman documented our history like a museum archivist.”
The fondness she emanates feels rehearsed, too smooth to be spontaneous. Under it, something uneasy sits there—resentment, maybe, or regret.
By the time she drifts into a mild remark about the weather over the southern gardens, Theo’s mind is already spinning through possibilities. Every detail she’s given him.
He’s still lost in thought when she changes the topic again. “She’s quite a woman, your Miss Jennings.”
Theo’s small smile is genuine this time. “She is.”
“I imagine she’d have to be, to keep up with you.” Her fingers adjust the porcelain saucer by instinct, realigning it just so. “That young woman,” she says, almost idly, “carries her grief with a composure I almost admire.”
Evelyn doesn’t look at him when she adds, “I imagine you also understand what it is to live among ghosts.”
He draws a slow breath through his nose, forcing his expression to stay composed. “I suppose I do,” he says, though it grates somewhere deep—because she’s right, and because she couldn’t possibly know how right.
He wonders, not for the first time, what it is she truly sees when she looks at him.
The same haunted weight she sees in Lila?
He sees it, too. The way she compartmentalizes, classifies, labels every emotion until it fits neatly in a mental file she can close.
He’s familiar with it himself, even if it comes from another place.
Theo has never felt close enough to press her about it.
Never earned her trust in a way that might encourage her to let him in.
But he wants to—God, he wants to. To know what she remembers when she goes quiet.
To be the one she doesn’t have to translate her pain for. He’d give almost anything for that.
And he hates that this is the one thing they share. That familiar ache of something unresolved.
He looks down into his cup, the faint tremor of rippling tea. “Ghosts have a way of overstaying their welcome, don’t they?”
Evelyn hums her agreement.
He lifts the cup to his lips to hide the sharp exhale that follows, forcing the calm back into place. Across the table, her expression smooths into that same effortless serenity, as though grief is simply another habit she’s learned to manage.
A floorboard creaks behind him, faint but distinct. He doesn’t have to turn to know it’s her.
Lila.
It’s in the way the air recalibrates.
Both he and Evelyn shift—subtle, instinctive—their postures softening, the conversation easing into something lighter. Whatever passed between them in the last few minutes folds itself neatly away, replaced by conversation that feels safer, more palatable for Lila’s sake.
Theo’s mind moves automatically, already selecting the first harmless topic that might bridge the silence—a polite observation, academic enough to sound natural, angled just enough to circle Evelyn back toward the topic of Victoria’s research when the moment allows.
He clears his throat, the plan settling into place. When he hears Lila’s footsteps approaching, he reaches for the empty teacup on the table beside him. By the time she steps fully into the room, his expression is smooth again, his composure set exactly where he needs it.
But his heart still feels too full, heavy with the ache of wanting her and the crushing certainty that she’d hate him if she knew what he’s hiding.