He needed to be careful. Thomas was proud—quietly, fiercely proud in the way of men who had earned everything they possessed through labour rather than inheritance. Pushing too hard, too fast, would make him retreat behind that dignity and refuse to answer.
Between rounds, they dropped to the bench. Thomas reached for a rag, dragging it across his face, and Alastair saw it.
A small, embroidered star.
It sat just below the collar of Thomas’s shirt, stitched into the linen with the sort of careful, deliberate needlework that spoke of love rather than fashion. A five-pointed star, no larger than a thumbnail, worked in thread that had once been white but had faded with years of washing into something closer to cream.
The world narrowed.
Alastair’s breath caught—a sharp, involuntary hitch that he disguised by reaching for his own water. Because he had seen that star before. Not on a shirt collar. Not worked into linen worn close against skin.
On the corner of a baby’s blanket.
He had dismissed it. Weeks ago, examining Rose’s blanket in the morning room, his attention had been consumed by the roses and the delicate floral tracery that dominated the fabric. But there, half-hidden in the fold of the hem—stitched so small it could have been mistaken for a loose thread or a seamstress’s mark—had been a star. The same star. The same careful, deliberate hand.
His fingers had traced it without registering its significance. Now, sitting on a scarred wooden bench in a boxing hall that stank of sawdust and sweat, the significance struck him with the force of Thomas’s best uppercut.
“That star on your shirt.” He kept his voice steady with an effort that cost him more than he would ever admit. “I’ve been meaning to ask about it.”
Thomas glanced down, his hand moving instinctively to the embroidery. His face changed—the hard edges loosening into something so private, so unguarded, that Alastair looked away. It felt like reading a letter not addressed to him.
“My mother’s work.” His thumb traced the stitching with absent familiarity. “She put this star on everything I owned, ever since I was a boy. Said it was her way of keeping me safe when she couldn’t be there herself. Shirts, handkerchiefs, even the lining of my coat once.” A ghost of a smile. “Drove me mad when I was young. What lad wants flowers and stars on his clothes? But now she’s gone, I...” He trailed off, his jaw tightening. “I keep the ones that still have her mark. Can’t quite bring myself to replace them.”
Alastair’s throat closed. He swallowed against it and reached for his water, though his mouth had gone dry for reasons that had nothing to do with exertion.
He forced himself to breathe. Forced himself to hide the sick, thundering certainty that was consuming him from the inside out.
“Thomas.” He set down the water and turned to face his friend fully. “I need to ask you something. And I need you to answer honestly.”
Thomas looked up. The shift in Alastair’s tone had not gone unnoticed—his friend’s posture changed, his shoulders squaring as though bracing for a blow that would not come from fists.
“Since when do I answer you any other way?”
Fair point. Alastair’s mouth twitched despite the gravity pressing down on him. “The woman you told me about. Months ago, in this very place. You said you’d met someone.”
The change was instantaneous. Thomas’s face closed like a door slamming shut—every trace of warmth, of openness, of that fragile almost-smile vanishing behind a wall of rigid composure.
“That’s done,” he said. Flat. Final. The voice of a man who had rehearsed those two words until they no longer drew blood. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“I think there is.”
“Alastair—”
“How did it end?”
Thomas stared at him. The boxing hall continued its raucous symphony around them—men shouting, canvas bags swinging, the world carrying on as though nothing of consequence were unfolding on this battered bench in the corner.
“It ended,” Thomas said at last, “because it was always going to end. I told you—she was above my station. I knew that. She knew that. We both knew what we were walking into.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Thomas’s jaw clenched. He looked away—toward the ring, toward the door, toward anywhere that was not Alastair’s too-perceptive gaze.
“Her parents found out.” The words came slowly, each one extracted like a splinter from beneath skin. “I don’t know how. Servants, perhaps. Or maybe we weren’t as careful as we believed. It doesn’t matter now. They found out, and they...” His hands curled into fists against his thighs—not sharp, not striking, but slow. The kind of grip a man uses when he is holding himself together. “They took her away. To their country estate. I tried to find her—wrote letters, asked anyone who might know where they’d gone. Nothing. She vanished as though she’d never existed.”
Alastair sat very still.
“She was from a noble family,” he said quietly. Not a question.