Five years after cruelly casting out his wife in disgrace, the Duke of Sliff saw her across the ballroom—with a boy who had his eyes and family birthmark, clutching a wooden horse carved by another man he called “Papa.”

PART 2

“Your Grace.” Lady Marfleet materialized at Isolt’s elbow. A stout, silver-haired woman with sharp eyes that missed nothing. Her hand already extending to draw Beatrice gently away from the tension crackling between the adults. “Forgive me. I believe the dancing is about to begin, and Beatrice grows tired. Isolt, my dear — shall we?”

“Yes.” Isolt’s voice was almost inaudible. “Yes, of course.”

“Wait.”

The word tore out of Leof before he could stop it. And half the room, he was dimly aware, had turned to watch the Duke of Sliff kneel in the middle of a ballroom floor and beg a woman in an unfashionable gray gown not to walk away from him.

He did not care.

He had spent five years not caring what anyone thought of anything, and it had brought him nothing but this. This ballroom. This candlelight. This small boy with his own eyes and his own family’s mark upon his wrist, slipping away from him into the crowd before he had even learned to breathe around the shape of what he had lost.

“I only wish to speak with you,” he said, lower now, for her alone. “Isolt. Please.”

She paused. For one long moment she stood entirely still, the candlelight catching warm copper lights in her chestnut hair — hair that once, on their wedding morning, had been strewn with orange blossom while he had thought himself the most fortunate man in England.

Then she looked down at her son. At her daughter’s small hand, now curled trustingly in Lady Marfleet’s. And something in her seemed to settle. Some decision reached in the space of a single breath.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Call at Marfleet House tomorrow, if you must speak with me. Not here. Not tonight.”

Her gaze flicked briefly, unmistakably, toward the far side of the room. And Leof followed it to see his cousin Silas Vain watching them with an expression of such careful blankness that it was itself a kind of confession.

Then she was gone. Swept into the crowd with Lady Marfleet and the children. And Leof remained kneeling on the ballroom floor of Wexford House, with three hundred pairs of eyes upon him, and the whole architecture of the last five years crumbling silently around his ears.

Because he understood, with the sudden terrible clarity of a man waking from a very long fever, that he had built his entire ruined life upon a lie. And his cousin’s face across the room told him exactly whose lie it had been.