Chapter Thirty
The corridor somehow felt longer on the way back. Or maybe that was just the antique box in my hands suddenly weighing about the same as a small avalanche.
I should’ve felt relieved. We’d found the brooch. The missing piece that had sent this entire wedding spiralling into chaos.
Except finding it hadn’t solved anything.
If anything, it had made everything worse.
Noah walked beside me in silence, and for once it wasn’t the comfortable kind we’d somehow slipped into lately. He looked completely thrown, like someone had reached into the middle of his life and yanked out a foundation brick.
I stayed close behind him, clutching the box and resisting the urge to say something comforting and completely useless like, ‘maybe your grandfather’s secret love child situation won’t be that bad?’
The portraits lining the corridor all seemed to share the same expression: deeply suspicious of moisturiser and happiness.
Under normal circumstances I would’ve told myself to stop being dramatic.
Unfortunately, we were carrying a stolen family heirloom and several decades’ worth of scandal between us, so the mood felt somewhat justified.
We reached Noah’s office without speaking.
The door closed behind us, and suddenly the room felt much smaller than it had earlier that morning.
Noah didn’t go to his desk. He went to the small sitting area instead, sinking into one of the armchairs like gravity had decided to triple just for him.
Finally, Noah spoke.
“Oh my God Holly—” His voice cracked.
He scrubbed his palms over his face, dragging them down slowly, as if the movement hurt.
“Why would Lady Beaumont have this?” he said quietly, looking at the brooch again. “Why would she have any of it?”
My pulse stumbled awkwardly.
Noah leaned back, staring at nothing, the light catching the tension along his jaw.
“Is Lady Beaumont ‘T’?” he asked.
It was the smallest question, but somehow the sharpest.
I knelt beside him, grounding the space between us. He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t pull away either.
“It’s not impossible. They could’ve known each other,” I offered gently. “Your grandfather worked overseas. She travelled. They were young once. Perhaps their families knew each other. We don’t know their story.”
He shook his head, a bitter, fragile sound escaping him.
“If she was T…” He let out a shaking breath. “Then maybe everything between them was real. The brooch. The letters. The baby.”
I rested my hand on his forearm.
“Noah,” I said lightly, “you’re trying to make sense of something that hasn’t finished unravelling yet,” I said.
His shoulders loosened by a fraction, but his voice was still a rough whisper when he finally spoke again.
“I just don’t know how this fits into the story I thought I knew.”
I tightened my hand gently on his arm, unsure whether it was to comfort him or ground myself.
The brooch sat on the table between us, looking deceptively harmless for something causing this much damage.
Then, a footstep.
Noah stiffened.
I turned and stood.
Lady Beaumont stood framed in the doorway.
She was paler than normal, like whatever composure she normally wore had started to crack.
Her eyes moved slowly, from Noah’s hunched posture to my hand still resting on his arm, to the antique box on the table between us.
A flicker, pain, recognition, resignation, passed through her eyes.
She closed the door behind her with a decisive click.
For a heartbeat, she simply stood there, hands clasped in front of her, back straight, chin lifted.
But her voice, when she finally spoke, was gentler than I’d ever heard it.
“That,” she said, her eyes on Noah, “is because the story you knew was never the whole one.”
My stomach dropped.
Lady Beaumont stepped further into the room, her heels whispering against the polished floor. She didn’t pretend not to notice the brooch glinting on the table.
She simply stared at Noah the way a person looks at a truth they’ve run from for far too long.
“The story you were told,” she continued, “was the one that protected us all. For a time.” She clasped her hands together, but they trembled despite her best effort. “But the one you deserve… is the truth.”
Lady Beaumont lifted her chin another fraction, as though preparing for a blow.
“I believe,” she said, voice steadying into something heartbreakingly formal, “that it is time you knew everything.”
And for the first time since I’d met her, Lady Beaumont seemed… vulnerable.
Noah’s jaw clenched.
I could feel the air thicken between them.
Lady Beaumont stepped forward, moving with careful delicacy.
She glanced at the brooch.
“You found it,” she said. Not a question. A confession wrapped in resignation.
She lowered herself into the chair opposite Noah, folding her hands with a dignity that was starting to crack.
I circled behind the desk, putting distance between us so the moment belonged to them.
“When I saw this… estate… on the wedding invitation,” she said stiffly, “I felt something I had not felt in decades.”
Her eyes glistened.
“Terror.”
She reached out and touched the edge of the brooch box with trembling fingertips.
“I came early,” she admitted. “Before I was intending to. To… look. To see whether anything remained. Letters. Tokens. Reminders of a time that was taken from me.”
Her voice frayed.
“I never intended for anyone to know.”
Noah stared at her, unblinking.
“Why?” he whispered.
Lady Beaumont’s lips parted, and her eyes shone, not with tears, but with a grief so old it had gone brittle.
“Because Edward was the love of my life,” she said.
The air left my lungs.
She pressed a hand lightly to her chest. “I was young. Foolish. Powerful people made decisions on my behalf. And I let them.”
She looked at the brooch, really looked at it.
“This was our symbol,” she whispered. “Our beginning. Back when I still thought we’d actually get one.”
Noah ran a trembling hand through his hair. “You’re T?” he asked.
Lady Beaumont lowered her eyes. “Yes. I was known as Tori by my friends, a nickname my mother hated.”
She continued, voice steadier now, as if unburdening herself gave her a new kind of clarity.
“I was terrified someone would uncover the truth. That someone would find his letters, his belongings, and put the pieces together. I did not want my past to harm my children. My grandchildren. Or Edward’s family.”
Her gaze drifted to Noah, full of apology and sorrow.
“But you have found everything,” she said.
She drew in a long breath, bracing herself, “And it is no longer possible to hide from the consequences.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and took a slow breath, as though trying to find the right place to begin. When she spoke, it felt like she was stepping back into a part of her life she’d spent years trying to leave behind.
“Edward and I met in England,” she began softly. “We were barely more than adults in society’s eyes. Back then, I was Victoria Ashbury.”
A small smile touched her lips.
“He was there for the summer, apprenticing at a vineyard in Kent. He’d saved for years to make the trip. Edward had this dream of turning his father’s little patch of farmland in Western Australia into a vineyard.” She gave a gentle laugh. “Wildly ambitious. Completely unheard of at the time.”
She stared out the window, as though seeing it all again.
“Margaret River wasn’t famous then. It was barely even on anyone’s radar. Just whispers from agricultural reports claiming the climate might rival Bordeaux.”
A faint, wistful smile touched her lips.
“He spoke about it with such fire. Most men I knew talked about inheritances. Edward talked about soil, sunlight, and what he wanted to build with his own hands.”
“I was staying with relatives in Surrey, and my aunt insisted on hosting endless soirées in hopes of marrying me off before I turned twenty-one.”
A distant look entered her eyes.
“We were introduced at a dinner party neither of us wished to attend. He stood near the French doors the entire evening, staring longingly at the garden as though he’d rather be pruning the hedges than speaking to any of the guests.”
Her eyes warmed with fragile memory.
“And then he spilled his wine on the tablecloth. A full glass of Merlot. Everywhere.”
Noah choked back a breath. “That sounds… exactly like him.”
“Of course it does,” she whispered, a small tremor in her smile.
“He blushed scarlet and immediately apologised to everyone within five metres, even to the footman who had absolutely nothing to do with it. Then he confessed the whole incident in front of forty people because lying, even socially, was not in his nature.”
She let out a broken laugh. “It was the most honest, mortifying thing I’d ever seen at a dinner table. And it was the moment I fell in love with him.”
Her fingers drifted to the brooch, tracing its edges with reverence.
“He was impossibly earnest. And kind. And utterly, devastatingly sincere. He spoke to me… not the way young men of society usually did. He wasn’t trying to impress me. He wasn’t trying to assess my worth or determine my suitability. He simply… saw me.”
Her voice thickened with emotion.
“He had this way of looking at you, directly, without flinching, as though anything you said mattered. As though you mattered.”
Something in my chest melted.
“We began to see each other secretly,” she continued.
“He would wait for me by the rose garden after supper. I would pretend to take an evening stroll with my cousin, then slip away when the maid turned her back. We’d talk for hours beneath the wisteria trellis, whispering about our lives, our hopes, our futures. ”
Her expression relaxed for a fraction.
“There were stolen moments at the edges of crowded rooms, his fingertips brushing mine as he passed a glass, the slightest glance across the table that made my heart pound. Letters slipped under doorways when neither of us dared risk speaking aloud.”
Her voice lowered, becoming almost humble.