For Three Months, She Poured Her Heart Into Letters to an Unknown Soldier Who Never Read a Single One — But a Scarred Duke Read Every Word, Memorized Her Heart, and Crossed a London Ballroom to Find Her

PART 6

For fourteen days, Aurora didn’t leave her house.

She told her father she had a lingering head cold. She told the servants she was not receiving callers. She told herself she was regaining her equilibrium.

It was all a lie. She was hiding.

Safety, she quickly discovered, felt remarkably like a tomb. The silence in the townhouse was deafening. Without the looming, unpredictable presence of Alistair Cavendish, her days reverted to their previous agonizing structure: breakfast at eight, needlepoint at ten, staring at the rain-streaked windows until her eyes ached. It was exactly the life she had curated before the letters, before the war.

It made her want to scream until her throat bled.

Society predictably noticed the duke’s sudden absence from her side. When Aurora finally forced herself to attend a Tuesday evening musical at the home of Lord and Lady Pembrook, she felt the stares the moment she entered. They clung to her like damp wool.

She sat in a gilded chair in the second row, posture rigid, listening to an Italian soprano absolutely butcher a piece by Mozart. The room was stiflingly warm. To her left, Lady Arbuthnot was whispering furiously behind a painted silk fan.

“Abandoned,” the woman hissed, the word carrying over the high notes. “Too sharp-tongued by half. Even a man broken by the Continent couldn’t stomach it for long.”

Aurora didn’t flinch. She kept her eyes fixed on the singer. A month ago, the gossip would have amused her — it would have validated her cynical view of the ton. Now it just felt exhausting. Profoundly hollow.

She looked at the empty chair beside her. She imagined Alistair there, long legs cramped in the delicate furniture, gray eyes dark with thinly veiled contempt for the entire spectacle. He would have leaned over and whispered something devastatingly accurate about the soprano’s vocal range, and she would have bitten the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.

But he wasn’t there. He had done exactly what she asked. He had left her alone.

The carriage deposited her back at Grosvenor Square near midnight. The house was dark, save for a single oil lamp burning on the entry table. She unfastened her cloak, fingers clumsy and cold.

“Miss Holloway.”

She jumped. The butler — a graying man named Higgins — materialized from the shadows near the stairs.

“Higgins. You frightened me.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “Why are you still awake?”

“A courier arrived shortly after you left for the musical, miss.” His face was entirely devoid of expression — a professional mask worn for thirty years. He extended a silver salver.

Resting in the center of the tray was a single folded piece of thick parchment.

Aurora stared at it. Her heart executed a violent, painful contraction. There was no family crest stamped in the wax. No elegant monogram. It was sealed with a plain, unmarked dollop of red wax, pressed flat by a heavy thumb.

It was an exact replica of the letters she had sent into the mud.

“Thank you, Higgins,” she managed. Her voice sounded thin, as if it belonged to someone else. She lifted the letter. The paper was heavy, textured. It felt like holding a live coal.

“Shall I turn down the lamp, miss?”

“No. Leave it. Go to bed.”

She didn’t wait for him to disappear before she broke the seal. She stood in the drafty entryway, the dim light throwing long, distorted shadows against the flocked wallpaper, and unfolded the paper.

The handwriting was sharp, purposeful. The crosses of the t’s looked like tiny swords.

Dear Miss Holloway —

I am told it is cowardly to write what one does not have the courage to say in person. I have spent the last two weeks contemplating this. I have concluded that cowardice is a matter of perspective. Sometimes ink is the only way through the armor.

I am leaving London tomorrow morning for Somerset. I do not know when I will return. The city is suffocating me, and you have made it abundantly clear that my presence here is an imposition you can no longer bear. I am a gentleman, despite my many failings, and I will not force myself upon a woman who looks at me with sheer terror in her eyes.

But I will not let you lie to yourself. Not anymore.

You kicked me out of your library because you were afraid — not of me. You were afraid that if you allowed someone to see the entirety of who you are — the sharp edges, the grief, the brilliant, infuriating mind — and they still stayed, you would have no excuse left to isolate yourself.

You told Corporal Reed that bravery is something one does because there are no other options available. You were wrong. Bravery is a choice — the conscious decision to stand in the mud when running away is infinitely easier.

You are running, Aurora. You are retreating into a society you despise because it demands nothing real from you. You sit in your drawing room wrapped in your grief, convinced you are protecting yourself from further pain. You are not protecting yourself. You are embalming yourself.

You accused me of falling in love with a phantom. You were right. I did. But phantoms do not argue back. Phantoms do not possess eyes that challenge every assumption I have ever made. Phantoms do not taste like rain and desperation.

I loved the phantom because it kept me breathing. I fell in love with the woman because she made me want to live.

I am not a perfect man. I am entirely broken in places that will likely never heal. I wake up in the dark expecting to smell gunpowder. I have a terrible temper and zero tolerance for the polite fictions of this world.

But I would have given you absolute honesty.

Keep your walls, Aurora. Keep your cynical observations and your pristine isolation. If they keep you warm at night, I concede defeat. But do not tell yourself it is because I didn’t know you. I knew you perfectly.

Yours, A. Cavendish

Aurora finished reading. She did not cry. Crying was a release — and what she felt now was a crushing, absolute compression.

She read it again. And a third time.

He had dismantled her with a single sheet of paper. He had stripped away every justification she had built over the last two weeks. He hadn’t flattered her. He hadn’t begged. He had held up a mirror to her cowardice and forced her to look into it.

You are embalming yourself.

She looked around the dim entryway of her father’s house. The expensive, tasteless vases. The faint smell of beeswax and stale potpourri. She realized with a sudden, sickening clarity that Alistair was entirely right. She was burying herself alive — playing the aloof spinster because it was easier than risking the devastation of losing someone again. Edward had died, and it had nearly killed her, so she had decided to never care about anything enough to let it destroy her.

But Alistair had bypassed her defenses entirely. He had walked straight through the front door of her mind and made himself at home.

She looked at the grandfather clock. It was midnight. He was leaving in the morning — going to Somerset to bury himself on his country estate, while she stayed here and slowly turned to dust.

“No.”

The word was small, spoken into the empty hall. It felt massive.

Aurora crumpled the letter in her fist. She turned toward the stairs — and abandoned the polite, slow tread of a lady. She ran. Took the steps two at a time, the heavy silk of her evening gown catching on her slippers. She burst into her bedchamber, startling the maid asleep in a chair by the fire.

“Mary!” She gasped, chest heaving. “Wake up.”

“Miss Aurora — is something wrong? Are you ill?”

“No.” She threw open the armoire. “I need my cloak. The heavy wool one. And walking boots — not these ridiculous slippers.”

“But miss, it is nearly one in the morning,” Mary stammered, entirely bewildered. “Where are you going?”

Aurora pulled off her silk gloves and threw them onto the bed. She looked at herself in the dressing glass — hair falling out of its pins, eyes wild. She looked like a madwoman.

She looked alive.

“I am going,” she said, her voice dropping into a deadly, determined calm, “to step on a duke’s boots.”