His voice was thick.
“Oh myGod,” Catherine breathed.
“Ah, but I came prepared. I had the letters I’d written to her. Years’ worth of them. I asked her husband permission to give them to her. And he granted it. She”—he swallowed—“wept when she read them.”
Catherine’s own eyes burned with tears.
“She is still a lovely person. She says she harbors no resentment of any kind toward me. Age and contentment can do that. She’s happy in her life, and claims she has no regrets. But she... she remembered being... afraid.” His voice was arid. “And very alone. And that was my fault.Idid that to her.”
He drew in a steadying breath and exhaled again.
“Now... it’s clear to me that we are almost nothing alike. All that drama, all that passion... funny, like an echo of a song once heard. I think... we all become more than one person throughout our lives, if we live long enough. We change. Who would we be if we’d stayed together? I do not know. I’ll never know. I’m glad she found someone to care for her, and someone to care for.”
For the first time in his harrowing conversation, the tightness in Catherine’s chest eased.
“I cannot say that things are entirely easy between the four of us—Anna and her husband and Leo and me—but it is civilized, and I imagine it will get easier. Her husband knows about me, and I have met him. He’s a good man. We all want to do right by Leo. And so I am helping to pay for my son’s education, and I was able to get him admitted to the University of Edinburgh. They didn’t ask me to intervene. But I knew it was a hope, and I offered, and I’m glad and grateful to be able to do it.”
Andthis,Catherine realized, was likely the reason Lord Kirke had allegedly backed away fromenticing investment opportunities, as Lady Wisterberg had mentioned. He now had a significant financial obligation to his son.
She was stunned, imagining the courage and humility it must have taken to meet Anna’s husband.
For this proud, arrogant man to look his son and Anna in the eyes, and somehow humbly attempt to reckon with his past.
She closed her eyes briefly. She wondered if he understood how brave he was.
“And you’ve met Leo?” she asked softly. Her own voice was thick.
He nodded. “Just once. Very briefly. He doesn’t think much of me. He doesn’t, in fact, like me at all.” He gave a soft laugh. He sounded uncertain, a word she had never once associated with him. “Mainly because he thinks I seduced and abandoned his mother, regardless of what she tells him. He is exactly as pig-headed as I am. Filled with brilliance and outraged morality. He’ll go far,” he said dryly. “But I think he’s a gentler boy than I ever was. The main thing is, I can make introductions for him. Pave his way. He may never like me. I can live with that. I’ve lived with worse. He might be my age by the time he comes to any understanding of what happened between his mother and me. I am good at waiting. I am good at playing a long game. He will come to his own understanding, however he does.”
“I’m certain he’s remarkable,” she said gently.
He cast her a wry, grateful look.
They sat for a moment. Silent but for the breeze shaking branches near them.
“I like to think I would have been a good father, Catherine. Or a good husband. But I don’t know. I wouldn’t be who I am now, and so who is to say. Iknow I likely would never have finished my education. More likely I would have become more and more myself, who I am now, without any direction for it, and I would have been even more insufferable and I would have made Anna miserable. But I didn’t get to raise my son. And I wasn’t able to help her, or comfort her. And that willgutme to the end of my days.”
His voice was taut. She saw the raw emotion rush his skin, and how he braced against it.
The person the world saw when they looked at Dominic—the weapon-like eloquence, the warrior spirit, the fearlessness—was a fortress built around this person, who loved fiercely, tenderly, and permanently. Who could be—had been, and still was—mortally hurt. She had seen, she had sensed this person from nearly the moment she’d met him.
Whatever else he’d done, he was a man of integrity now.
She was certain he’d never lied to her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. She only hoped her voice conveyed how she felt better than the words.
He nodded, acknowledging this.
He was quiet a moment, apart from his breathing, which was still a bit unsteady.
“But here is the thing, Catherine... I think it would have been within her father’s rights to shoot me when I went to him. Because even at seventeen I knew better. I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it. So did she, in the moment—I asked her if she was certain before I”—he closed his eyes briefly, and stopped himself—“but for God’s sake, that is quite beside the point. It was up tometo stop it and I did not because I wanted it. It seemed impossible to deny myself at the time. Iknow now that’s not true. I simply cannot forgive myself for that.”
And this was the crux of it. What he was trying to convey to her.
Love and the loss of it had left a great smoking crater in his life many years ago.
It seemed clear now the very notion of love was entwined with terror and guilt and self-loathing. And desire, that powerful force which she now understood as one of the languages humans are given to express love, had been the thing that nearly destroyed him.