CHAPTER NINE

Arthur’s POV

I had the east wing guest room prepared three days before Bryan was due to arrive.

Margaret had looked at me sideways when I gave the instruction, though, not impolitely but with the expression of a woman who had managed this household for over three decades and knew when there were particular changes in the owner’s behavior.

The east wing guest room was the one with the window seat overlooking the garden, the one I had repainted twice in the last decade trying to get the color right, but had being left unused since Xavier was a boy grown enough to no longer need it.

I didn’t explained myself to Margaret. I simply told her to have it ready, to stock it with things a five-year-old might find useful, and to ensure the kitchen had the ingredients for the pancakes I intended to make myself on Saturday morning regardless of what the cook had already planned.

The truth was, I had been thinking about Bryan Ashford since the afternoon I met him in that hospital play area, and the thoughts had not paced down in the weeks since. If anything, it had intensified with each phone call, each visit, each moment I watched him and felt the insistent pull of a feeling I couldn’t name clearly enough to dismiss.

He reminded me of when Xavier was a little boy.

That was the thought I kept turning away from and kept returning to, the way the tongue returns to a sore tooth despite itself.

Bryan had an undisputable resemblance with Xavier. His eyes, his jawline, his whole face shape. I had told myself repeatedly and firmly, that resemblances were common and coincidences were not conspiracies. And that a lonely old man’s imagination had a well-documented tendency toward wishful thinking.

I had almost convinced myself successfully.

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Aria and Bryan arrived on a Saturday morning as promised at the estate gates in Aria’s small car, with Bryan already half-hanging out of the passenger window before the vehicle had fully stopped.

I watched from the front steps as he climbed out and stood on the gravel drive and looked up at the estate with his mouth slightly open, turning slowly on the spot to take in the full width of the building. The oak trees lining the far edge of the lawn that were older than anyone currently living on the property.

“It’s so big,” he said.

“It is,” I agreed, walking down to meet them. “I’ve lived in it for fifty years and I still find rooms I had forgotten about.”

He turned to me with his full attention, which was one cute thing about Bryan, when he looked at you, he looked completely, like you had all of him at once. “Can we find one today?”

“That,” I said, “is exactly what I was hoping you’d suggest.”

Aria watched the exchange with the soft, cautious warmth she always carried. A woman who loved her son with the kind of fierceness that never quite let its guard down entirely, even in the middle of ordinary moments. “Behave yourself,” she told Bryan quietly. “Listen to Arthur.”

“He’s perfectly welcome to be himself,” I said. “That’s considerably more interesting than behaving.”

Bryan beamed at me like I had said something revolutionary.

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We spent the morning moving through the house at his pace, which was considerably faster than mine but I accommodated without complaint.

He asked questions about everything, the portraits in the main corridor, the age of the grandfather clock in the east hall, why the library had a ladder on a rail, whether any of the suits of decorative armor had ever been worn by anyone in battle.

I answered every question of his with honesty, including the armor, which disappointed him slightly when I admitted they were mostly ceremonial.

“Xavier used to make that same face when I told him that,” I said, without thinking.

“Who’s Xavier?” Bryan asked immediately.

“My grandson,” I said. “He grew up in this house.”

Bryan seems to consider this. “Does he still live here?”

“He has his own home now,” I said. “But he visits.”

Bryan accepted this with the philosophical ease of a child for whom adult living arrangements were largely irrelevant.

He moved on to the next item that caught his attention, a glass cabinet in the corner of the library holding a collection of antique compasses and navigational instruments that I hadn’t looked at properly in years.

We had lunch in the garden, the three of us. Aria had relaxed considerably by midday, her caution softened into something closer to enjoyment, laughing at things Bryan said with the unguarded laugh she rarely showed in our early conversations. I watched her across the table and thought, not for the first time, that she was a woman who carried more weight than she ever showed and more strength than she ever claimed credit for.

After lunch, Bryan grew quieter, he wasn’t tired exactly, but the particular quietness of a child whose body had started catching up with his energy. He sat in the window seat in the library with one of the illustrated books from the shelf I had stocked specifically for him, his good leg tucked underneath him, while his recovering ankle propped on the cushion beside him.

I sat across the room in my reading chair, apparently with a newspaper, actually watching him with the pretense of doing reading the newspaper.

The afternoon light came through the west window at an angle that caught him clearly, the curve of his cheek, the small furrow between his brows as he concentrated on the page, the way he mouthed certain words slightly as he read them.

It was the light, I think, made me saw it.

He turned his head toward the window to look at something outside, presenting his face profile fully, and the late afternoon sun caught the left side of his face in a way that hadn’t happened before in any of our previous interactions in artificial light indoors, or at angles that hadn’t quite aligned.

Then I saw his ear, but that was not what surprised me.

Behind his left ear, was a small, subtle fold of skin at the rear of the lobe, it wasn’t a deformity. More like the kind of fold most people would look at and see nothing remarkable. But I was not most people, I had seen that exact fold, in that exact spot, on three men across two generations of my bloodline.

My father had carried it. I had carried it until age softened it almost to nothing.

Xavier carried it now, clean and unmistakable, on the same ear, in the same spot.

And that same fold is sitting on Bryan’s ear. Same fold, same spot.

The newspaper in my hands had stopped being a paper I was simply holding as I gripped it tighter than I intended without me noticing, the paper creasing slightly under the pressure of my fingers.

Bryan turned back from the window, found a comfortable position against the cushion again, and went back to his book, completely unaware of what the light had just shown me.

I looked at him. I really looked at him this time, without the gentle filter of fondness I’d been viewing him through for weeks, this time with clinical attention.

The jaw, the eyes, the way his brow furrowed when he concentrated. It wasn’t just imagination. It wasn’t a lonely old man reaching for patterns that weren’t there.

He was exactly like the younger Xavier.

I set the newspaper down carefully and said nothing. Bryan didn’t notice, Aria was somewhere in the east corridor where Margaret had taken her to show her the garden access she had mentioned at lunch.

I sat still and pondered on a lot of possibilities, and the thought I had been avoiding for weeks came rushing into my head with the terrible clarity of what may had been true but had simply been waiting for the right angle of light to prove it.