Chapter 6: The Cotswolds

The Blackwood house in the Cotswolds was exactly what Cara had expected and nothing like she had prepared for.

Stone walls. Ivy climbing the front. A garden that had gone slightly wild in the way expensive gardens were allowed to. The kind of house that had been in a family long enough to stop being a property and start being a place.

She stepped out of the car and stood for a moment in the cold morning air.

Ethan appeared beside her.

"Alright?" he said quietly.

"Don't ask me that."

"I'm not asking if you're nervous. I'm asking if the drive was alright."

Cara glanced at him.

"Fine," she said. "The drive was fine."

Eleanor was at the door before they reached it.

"You came." She said it directly to Cara, like Ethan's presence was assumed and hers was the one that mattered. She pulled her into a hug that lasted long enough to be genuine.

Cara went still for half a second.

Then she hugged her back.

Inside, the house smelled like woodsmoke and old books. The dog from Richmond was somehow already here, stationed in front of the fireplace like he owned the place. Sophie appeared from the kitchen doorway and waved. James stood at the bottom of the stairs and smiled the smile that didn't reach his eyes.

"Cara," he said. "Good to see you again."

"You too," she said pleasantly.

He held her gaze a moment too long.

She held it right back.

Robert was in the sitting room.

He looked smaller than he had at dinner. The armchair seemed larger around him. But when Cara walked in, his eyes sharpened the same way they had before — alert, assessing, completely present.

"You came back," he said.

"You made it worth coming back."

He smiled at that. Slowly, like the muscles needed reminding.

"Sit," he said.

She sat.

Ethan hovered near the doorway.

"Leave us," Robert said, without looking at his grandson.

A pause.

Then Ethan left.

Robert looked at her for a long moment.

"He's different," he said finally.

"Different how?"

"Since you." He adjusted his position slightly. "Ethan has spent ten years being the most competent person in every room. Competence is a very efficient way of keeping people at a distance."

Cara said nothing.

"You don't keep your distance," Robert said. It wasn't a compliment or a criticism. Just an observation.

"I don't have the energy for it," she said honestly.

Robert nodded slowly.

"Tell me about your mother," he said.

The shift was so direct it almost caught her off guard.

Almost.

"She's been unwell for three years," Cara said. "I've been taking care of things since then."

"Your father?"

"Not in the picture."

"Siblings?"

"No."

Robert was quiet for a moment.

"So it's been you," he said. "Alone."

"Yes."

"And then Ethan."

Cara held his gaze.

"And then Ethan," she said.

Robert studied her with those sharp, tired eyes.

"Do you love him?" he asked.

The question sat in the warm air of the sitting room.

Cara didn't answer immediately. She let the silence hold for a moment the way she'd seen Ethan do — not as avoidance, but as respect for the weight of the question.

"I think," she said carefully, "that I'm still learning what that means with him."

Robert considered this.

"That's the most honest answer anyone has given me in a long time," he said quietly.

He reached out and patted her hand once. His hand was cold and light.

"Take care of him," he said. "He doesn't know how to ask for it."

Cara looked at the old man's face. At the tiredness in it. At the love underneath the tiredness.

"I know," she said softly.

And the thing that frightened her, sitting in that warm room with woodsmoke and an old man's hand on hers, was that she wasn't entirely performing anymore.

That evening, after dinner, after Eleanor's Lebanese food on her best china, after James's careful questions and Sophie's easy laughter and the dog falling asleep across Cara's feet again — Ethan and Cara walked the garden in the cold dark because Eleanor had suggested it and neither of them had found a reason to say no.

They walked without speaking for a while.

The sky was very clear. Very full.

"Your grandfather asked if I loved you," Cara said.

Ethan's pace didn't change.

"What did you say?"

"That I was still learning what that meant with you."

A long pause.

"That was well handled," he said.

"It wasn't handling," she said quietly. "It was just true."

Ethan stopped walking.

Cara stopped a step later and turned to look at him.

He was watching her with an expression she hadn't seen before. Not the controlled boardroom face. Not the almost-smile. Something underneath both of those. Something that looked, in the cold dark of his grandfather's garden, uncomfortably close to real.

He looked away first.

"We should go in," he said. "It's cold."

"Ethan."

He stopped.

She didn't say anything else. She didn't have anything to follow it with. His name had just come out — not as a question, not as a challenge. Just as itself.

He stood still for a moment.

Then he shrugged off his jacket and held it out to her.

Cara looked at it.

Took it.

They walked back to the house without speaking. But his hand brushed hers once in the dark, briefly, and neither of them moved away.