But Clara?
Clara could leave. Clara could die. Clara could never love him in return.
And yet he’d still love her. Through every pain and worry, still his heart would sing her name.
He loved Clara best of all. Her the first—the only—woman he’d loved, knowing how much it could hurt him. Not caring. As long as she was safe and happy.
Yet, his heart felt more unsteady than it had before Lord Tefler’s arrival.
He should feel nothing but joy. He was in love. And early this morning, Matilda had birthed a baby girl. Katherine. Wailing like a banshee. Or like her grandmother. Raph had already givenher a nickname. Several. My Kate, perfect Kate, Kate my tiny, feathered thing.
Kate possessed no feathers. She possessed a wrinkly, red face, tiny little fists, and a perfect set of lungs. She’d be a singer, she would. Atlas would teach her.
And he’d teach Alfie, too.
Had Lord Tefler touched Alfie, Atlas would have ripped his limbs from his body and faced whatever noose they hung around his neck with righteousness. Thankfully, it had not come to that. His mother’s theatrics had saved Clara and saved him from resorting to violence.
He didn’t have to face a noose.
He could make a life instead.
Seated at his pianoforte, Atlas stared at the open ring box he’d set atop it. The opal glowed in the sunlight, gathering the day’s brightness into its endless, milky depths.
Endless and forever did not seem so bleak as they used to. They seemed, like the opal, brilliant and beautiful.
He hummed the tune that had soared through him since they’d sent Lord Tefler packing. A light thing, flying high, almost buzzing. A pink rose petal on the wind, swooping and sailing. His fingers hovered over the keys, not ready to touch them until he knew with absolute certainty the right words to put with the melody.
He closed his eyes. Clara and her bright hair and her curvy body and her big, bold heart. Alfie, who climbed to the sky as often as he could no matter how far he risked falling. Alfie, who had threatened to put shit in Atlas’s boots. Alfie, who Atlas thought of simply as his son. Both woman and boy his family, his home, his heart.
The first key cold beneath his fingertip brought the room to life. The melody he crafted with each press of finger against key sang through the air, brushed against his skin.
He hummed, a small prelude to prepare his lips and tongue for truth.
And then he sang. “On distant shores I lost my way, the sky came crashing down. Star-shaped wounds across my skin, the clouds my burial gown. Home was lost and beauty dead, until she gave me life.” A good first verse.
He raised an octave for the next. “The ocean brought me home again, but night still held my soul. Home welcomed me with open arms, but my heart had become a coal. Home was lost and beauty dead until she gave me life.”
One more verse, and it needed to be just as true. His brows drew together, the words dangling out of reach. More difficult to grasp because the emotions were newer. The song died as he stood, snapped up the ring, nestled it into his chest pocket, close to his heart, and made for the door. But the music still hummed in the air. It followed him like a swarm of bees as he made his way to the dower house.
They’d completed their work on it weeks ago, though he’d been doing his best to extend the project. He could no longer pretend to find fault in order to tear their work down, in order to delay the end of everything. Everywhere he looked in the damn house—perfection. Because she’d made it so.
He could not even guess what she worked on today. Nothing left to do. At least that meant he would not be distracting her. He needed her. Right that moment. He needed the inspiration her mere presence gave him. Because he was so close to finishing the thing he’d been working towards for so long, so close to closing so many dark chapters of his life.
He pushed through the door. “Clara?”
No answer.
He found his way to the small room at the back of the house that she’d been using as a little shop to work on the furniture sherepaired and made. She’d lately kept the door shut and locked. Did that mean something?
Well, something other than,Stay out, you nodcock, I’m busy at the moment.
Did it mean she did not want him? Other than as a protector, a provider. Because she no longer needed his protection. And they were done with the house. She could, if she wished, leave. Only their marriage kept her here, a prisoner of the vows that bound them together. Vows she’d only made to save her son.
He rapped on the door. “Clara?”
After a moment of silence, he pressed his ear to the door. “Clara?”
“Go away.” Two words muffled but telling—pulled from a raw throat and accompanied by sniffles, suppressed sobs.
