Page 104 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“You are not intruding, Elizabeth. You have not intruded in twenty-six years of marriage. You have managed, and compensated, and carried, and I have let you, and that is a different conversation I intend to have properly. But not today.” He gestured to the chair beside the bookcase. “Sit with us.”

Elizabeth sat. She placed the embroidery in her lap and folded her hands over it, and the three of them occupied the small study together, and the silence that followed was not the silence of avoidance. It was the silence of people deciding where to begin.

“The engagement,” her father said. “Your mother told me. I should have asked you myself. I will now. Why did you end it?”

“I ended it because Frederick never knew me. He admired a version of me that was convenient for him, and I spent two years trying to become that version because I thought being chosen was the same as being loved.” She looked at her hands. “It is not.”

“No,” her mother said quietly. “It is not.”

Her father leaned back in his chair. The leather creaked beneath him, a sound the study had not made in a long time.

“And the Duke?” he asked. “Oliver Sinclair. What is he to you, Louisa?”

Louisa hesitated, then lifted her chin. “He is the man I love.”

Her mother’s hands tightened on the embroidery. Her father was quiet for a long time, his blue-grey eyes fixed on her face.

“And he loves you.” Though it was not a question, Louisa chose to answer it anyway.

“Yes. He told me so yesterday morning.”

Her father looked at her mother. Elizabeth looked back. Twenty-six years of marriage passed between them in that glance, every sacrifice and adjustment and quiet act of endurance compressed into a single exchange that their daughter could see but not fully translate.

“Then I suppose,” Charles Fairchild said, and his voice held a warmth that had been missing from it for longer than any of them wanted to calculate, “we had better wind that clock.”

He reached for the mantelpiece. The key sat in the small brass dish where it had always been, untouched, waiting. He fitted it into the mechanism and turned it six times, and the ticking resumed, steady and unremarkable, filling the study again, the ordinary sound of time moving forward.

Louisa watched her father replace the key. She watched her mother’s hand reach across the desk and cover his, briefly, before withdrawing. She watched the study reassemble itself around a man who had decided, after years of sitting still, to stand up.

She did not leave for a long time.

EPILOGUE

Oliver chose Ashford Hall.

They travelled down to Hampshire at the end of June, the Fairchilds in one carriage, Oliver ahead in his. Mrs. Henning had aired the rooms and filled the vases and stood at the front door, waiting as though she had personally prayed for this moment.

Charles Fairchild stepped down from his carriage and studied the façade. His gaze moved along the roofline, down the ivy-covered east wing, across the stable block visible beyond the lime avenue.

“Your south gable needs attention,” he said, eyeing Oliver pensively.

Oliver nodded. “It does.”

“Lead flashing. You can see where the mortar has failed from here.”

“The surveyor identified it last autumn. I have been meaning to address it.”

“You should address it before winter. Once the damp gets beneath the lead, you will be replacing stonework as well as flashing, and stonework on a house this age costs more than most people’s annual income.” Fairchild turned to Oliver. “I could look at the surveyor’s report, if you like. I… used to understand these things.”

“I should welcome that very much, sir.”

Elizabeth touched her husband’s arm. He covered her hand with his, briefly, and the two of them followed Mrs. Henning inside. Oliver watched them go. The older man’s shoulders were straighter than they had been a month ago. Not restored, not entirely, but adjusting.

The proposal was meant for Monday evening. But Sebastian arrived unannounced on Monday afternoon, dusty from the road, demanding supper and an audience for a story about a horse he had nearly purchased in Newbury.

“A grey mare,” Sebastian said over dinner, gesturing with his fork. “Sixteen hands. Magnificent temperament. The asking price was outrageous, naturally, but I was prepared to be outrageous.”

“What stopped you?” Louisa asked.