Three years she carried his life on her back and he never once thought to ask what it cost her. Then she stopped answering his secret signal across a crowded ballroom — and something in him finally cracked open.

 PART 3

He had thought of Christine the way a man thinks of a load-bearing wall — something you trust without ever admiring, something you assume will simply hold the roof up forever. But Christine was not a wall. She was a woman, and she had taken her structural support and walked out the door on her own two feet, and the roof was coming down around him while he stood in the wreckage doing nothing at all.

After dinner, the gentlemen retired for cigars. Alagan drank his brandy too fast. It burned going down and did nothing for the icy knot lodged behind his ribs. He barely spoke. He stood at the window, staring out at the black moors, waiting for the polite interval to pass so he could go back to the women’s side of the house.

When the doors to the music room finally opened, he moved with single-minded purpose. He walked past the Haddingtons. He walked past Beatrice, who was trying to flag him down to turn pages at the pianoforte. He cornered Christine by the heavy drapes near the terrace doors.

“You are avoiding me,” he said. No preamble. The cynical edge he usually wore had been stripped clean away, leaving only raw panic underneath.

Christine looked up at him. She didn’t step back. She didn’t step forward.

“I am not avoiding you, Alagan. We are standing in the same room.”

“We’ve been in the same house for three days. You haven’t spoken two words to me.”

“You’ve been occupied with Miss Littleton. I didn’t wish to intrude.”

“You never used to worry about intruding.”

“I’ve learned better manners.”

He gripped the edge of the drape, because if he didn’t hold on to something he was afraid he’d take her by the shoulders and shake her. “What is happening, Christine? What did I do? Tell me what I did wrong and I will fix it.”

She looked at his white-knuckled hand on the fabric, then slowly brought her eyes up to his. For one terrible second, Alagan saw exactly what he had missed for three years — the sheer depth of what she had felt for him, and beneath it, the cold ash of a fire that had already burned itself all the way out.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Alagan,” she said. Her voice was gentle the way a doctor’s voice is gentle when delivering a diagnosis that cannot be fixed. “You did exactly what you have always done. You were entirely yourself.”

“Then why—”

“Because I grew tired.” Her voice stayed soft. “I grew tired of waiting for a man who only looks at me when he needs something fixed. I am not a mechanic, Alagan. I am a person. And I am done fixing you.”

She didn’t wait to see the devastation crack across his face. She turned and walked away, the emerald silk whispering against the floorboards, and left him standing by the window, entirely alone.

Panic is a quiet disease. It doesn’t announce itself with shattered glass. It creeps through the floorboards until drawing breath feels like lifting stones.

Alagan returned to London a haunted man. His townhouse on Grosvenor Square — once a sanctuary of orderly comfort — now felt hostile. The fire in his study either roared or smoldered into ash. His correspondence, once stacked neatly by Christine’s hand, now formed a chaotic mountain of wax seals and other people’s demands.

Two days after Yorkshire, he walked into the Littletons’ drawing room with no speech prepared, no clever deflection — Christine had always been the architect of those — and told Beatrice he could not offer her his hand.

She’d stared at him, pale eyes narrowing to slits. “You cannot be serious. We are all but announced. My mother has ordered lace from Brussels.”

“I will compensate you for the lace,” he said, the words tasting like ash. “I’m sorry, Beatrice. I truly am. But it would be a disaster. We do not suit.”

“We suit perfectly well. We have estates that border one another. You have a title. I have a dowry. What more do you require?”

Someone who looks at me and sees me, he thought. Not a property line. He didn’t say it. He bowed, accepted a slapped cheek with grim stoicism, and left.

The scandal simmered through Mayfair’s drawing rooms. He ignored it with the focus of a man walking calmly out of a burning building. Let them talk. Let them say he was mad. He felt mad.

He sat in his study now, silence pressing against his eardrums. He reached for the bellpull to ring for brandy. His hand stopped midair.

He didn’t want brandy. He wanted to ask Christine if he should answer Lord Petersham’s invitation. He wanted the scratch of her pen across vellum. He wanted to see the small furrow between her brows when she read a badly phrased sentence.

He dropped his hand. Twenty-eight years old, an earl of the realm, and he felt entirely incapable of managing a Tuesday afternoon.

Because he knew, with sickening force, that he knew almost nothing about her. Her handwriting. Her schedule, only insofar as it touched his own. That she drank tea instead of coffee. That she always sat with her back to the door at large dinners — though he had never once asked why.

What did she read when she was alone? What was her favorite flower? What were her private, quiet griefs?

For three years she had been a mirror, reflecting his own life back at him. He had never once stepped around the glass to look at the woman holding it.

Driven by a restless, almost frantic energy, he began going to places he usually avoided — the British Museum, Hyde Park at its most congested hour, recitals that made his teeth ache. He was hunting, and he knew it, and he didn’t care.

He found her on a Thursday at a landscape exhibition in Somerset House, standing before a brooding canvas of a Scottish moor, calm and self-contained in deep plum. Beside her stood Henry Akerman, holding her reticule — a small, absurdly domestic gesture that made Alagan’s hands curl into fists — looking at her the way a man looks at something he has actually noticed.

Alagan felt the floor tilt again. He had owned a diamond of incalculable worth and used it to prop open a door. Now another man was picking it up, polishing it, holding it to the light.

He walked forward. He had no plan. He only knew that standing still was tearing him apart.