Chapter Eight The Brother She Never Saw #3
She looked up.
“What?”
“If I had told him directly—”
“Do not.”
Sebastian stopped. Clara’s expression had changed. Not angry now. Tired.
“You are not responsible for Adrian proposing to me.”
“If he did it because—”
“Because he was jealous of you. That was his choice.”
Sebastian looked away. He wanted Adrian alive. For perhaps the first time since hearing of his death, Sebastian wanted his brother alive so badly it hurt. Not to forgive him. To hit him. Clara took the letter back.
“There is more.”
She read silently. Adrian had added a second page.
Months later. Then another. Different dates.
The letter had become something like a confession he repeatedly reopened and never sent.
He wrote that he had returned to England intending to see Clara and failed.
That every month made explanation harder.
That society had already built a story around her, and correcting it would require publicly admitting what he had done.
He could not bear it. Sebastian felt sick.
Adrian had known. He had watched Clara carry the blame.
And done nothing. The final addition was dated two years ago.
By then Adrian had discovered their father’s financial wrongdoing.
He wrote that Bellamere might provide one opportunity to repair what the Harcourts owed the Whitcombes, though he knew money could not repair what he had done personally.
Clara finished. Folded the letter. Placed it on the desk.
Then sat very still. Sebastian did not know what to say.
Nothing seemed adequate. Eventually Clara spoke.
Sebastian watched Clara keep one hand upon the folded pages as though the paper might otherwise rearrange itself into a kinder history.
He had expected anger from her, and perhaps tears, but what appeared instead was a terrible concentration.
She was reading backward through eleven years, testing old memories against facts that had arrived far too late.
Sebastian knew that expression because he had spent much of his own life doing the same with his father.
“I remember the morning after he left,” she said at last. “Aunt Marianne removed the wedding flowers before I came downstairs, but she missed one arrangement in the back parlor. I found it there after breakfast and thought, absurdly, that someone had forgotten to tell the flowers the wedding was over.” Her mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile.
“For years I remembered that morning as proof that I had been foolish. I thought every happiness I had felt before it must have been evidence that I had failed to see something everyone else would have seen.”
Sebastian remained where he was. Every instinct urged him to cross the room, but after the previous night he understood that comfort could become another decision made on Clara’s behalf if he offered it before she asked. He forced his hands to remain at his sides and listened.
“That is the ugliest part,” Clara continued.
“Not that Adrian was jealous of you. Not even that he ran. It is that I made his cowardice into a judgment upon myself. Every time a woman lowered her voice when I entered, every time a gentleman chose another partner, every time somebody was excessively kind, I thought perhaps they knew the thing he had discovered and I did not.” She looked down at the letter. “There was no thing.”
“No.” Sebastian’s answer came with more force than he intended.
Clara lifted her eyes, and he made himself continue more quietly.
“There was his vanity, my father’s pride and my silence.
There was a family that preferred embarrassment to truth.
But there was never a hidden fault in you that explained what he did. ”
Clara drew a slow breath. Some of the strain left her shoulders, though the relief did not resemble happiness.
It looked more like exhaustion after carrying a weight so long that putting it down left the body uncertain how to stand without it.
“I do not forgive him,” she said. “Not because he is dead, and not because he eventually felt ashamed.”
“You do not owe him forgiveness.”
“No.” She traced the fold of the paper with one fingertip. “But I think I can stop asking him the question.”
Sebastian understood without asking which question she meant.
Why was I not enough? It had sat beneath every version of the scandal, beneath every room Clara entered already braced for recognition, and beneath his own helpless fury at having known she was suffering without ever understanding how completely she had turned Adrian’s failure inward.
The letter could not return eleven years to her, but it could at least end that interrogation.
Clara looked toward the unfinished light at the windows. “I wish my mother had known.”
That hurt differently. “So do I.”
“She tried very hard not to speak badly of him. I thought it was because she hoped he might return.” Clara shook her head. “Now I think she was afraid that if she called him a coward, I would hear the word and somehow believe she was speaking about my judgment in choosing him.”
Sebastian crossed the room then, but only far enough to stand beside the desk. He did not touch her. “Your mother knew you were eighteen.”
Clara gave him a tired glance. “So was I. I had forgotten that kindness.” For a moment she simply sat with the admission, and Sebastian felt the morning change around them.
Adrian’s confession had not repaired the past; it had made the past accurate.
Perhaps accuracy was the first mercy available to them.
“I spent eleven years wondering what defect he discovered in me.”
Sebastian’s chest tightened.
“There was never one.”
She gave a tired, almost incredulous smile.
“You cannot know that.”
He looked at her. Eleven years. Every room.
Every remembered conversation. Every report he had heard of her.
Every glimpse across ballrooms after his return to England.
Every breakfast since their marriage. Every argument.
Every account she corrected. Every servant whose name she remembered.
Every laugh. Every infuriating question.
“Clara, I have had eleven years to look.”
She stopped breathing. Or seemed to. Sebastian realized what he had said. He did not regret it. Her eyes filled. Not with tears exactly. Something deeper.
“You really did.”
“Yes.”
The room changed. No storm this time. No darkness to conceal them. Morning sunlight crossed the carpet. Adrian’s confession lay between them. Clara stood. Sebastian remained still. She came toward him. He did not retreat. Not again. Her hand touched his face. The gesture undid him.
“Do not stop me this time,” she whispered.
Sebastian’s restraint broke. He kissed her.
There was nothing ceremonial about it. Nothing careful enough to be mistaken for courtesy.
His hands came to her waist as Clara moved closer, and the first touch of her mouth against his held all the questions they had refused to answer since their wedding.
Sebastian had imagined kissing her for eleven years.
Imagination had been useless. Clara was warm and real beneath his hands, one palm resting against his cheek while the other caught at the front of his coat.
She kissed him without hesitation now, and when he drew back for breath she followed him, making a small impatient sound that nearly destroyed the last of his control.
He kissed her again. Slower. Deeper in feeling, though no less restrained in where he allowed his hands to remain.
Clara’s fingers moved into his hair. Sebastian forgot Bellamere.
Forgot the ledger. Forgot Adrian. For several moments there was only the impossible reality of Clara choosing to kiss him.
Not because a clergyman waited. Not because society expected it.
Not because they had signed an agreement.
Because she wanted to. Sebastian finally rested his forehead against hers.
Both were breathing too quickly. Clara’s eyes remained closed.
“We should stop.”
“Yes.”
Neither moved. A moment passed. Clara opened her eyes.
“You are not stopping.”
“Neither are you.”
“That is true.”
He almost kissed her again. Instead he forced himself to loosen his hold. Clara stepped back. The loss of her warmth was immediate. They looked at each other. Something irreversible had happened. Sebastian knew it. Clara knew it too. Neither seemed willing to name it. She turned toward the desk.
“Adrian’s letters.”
“Yes.”
“We should read the others.”
“Yes.”
Neither moved toward them. Clara touched her mouth. Sebastian looked away before the sight persuaded him to abandon every honorable intention he possessed.
“The ledger,” he said.
“Of course.”
“We still need it.”
“Yes.”
“And Lionel.”
“Yes.”
A pause. Clara looked at him.
“Sebastian?”
“Yes?”
“That was not gratitude.”
He met her gaze.
“No.”
“Or confusion.”
“No.”
“Good.”
She turned back toward the letters. Sebastian stood behind her, heart still pounding, and understood that whatever bargain they had made in Augusta’s library no longer described the marriage they were living.
The legal arrangement remained. The mystery remained.
Adrian’s failures remained. But Clara had kissed him because she wanted to.
And Sebastian, who had spent eleven years believing that wanting her was something he must carry alone, no longer knew what to do with hope.