Langley's face had turned the color of parchment. "Yes."
Thea moved forward until she stood a foot from her brother. The next words out of her mouth surprised her.
They were not what she had intended to say. "May I touch you?"
Jared's eyes widened a fraction, but other than that, his expression did not change.
"I have seen many sketches of you. I imagined you so often, what you were thinking, what you were doing. I need to know you are real." She reached out her hand and, when he did not move away, placed it over the scar on his cheek. Her fingertips tingled when they came into contact with the puckered flesh. "I had a dream. A nightmare. When this happened."
He didn't speak, and she let her hand fall away. She laid the journals on the table. "One day you will want to read them. You will want to know her. Perhaps, one day you will even want to know me."
She turned to go, her promise to Mama fulfilled.
His hand snaked out and grasped her arm. "I do know you." He pulled her back around to face him. "I've dreamt about you many times. Once I dreamt that you cried uncontrollably and I was desperate to comfort you, but you were just an image from my dreams. Not real."
A small, strangled sound emanated from her throat. She threw herself against him and proceeded to dampen his shirt with her tears. He let his arms close around her awkwardly and then patted her back.
Suddenly everyone in the room was talking at once. Jacqueline's strident tones mixed with Lady Upworth's no-nonsense statements. Langley's voice talked over Irisa's, and Drake overrode them all with a demand for quiet.
Jared let her go and Drake pulled her back into his side. Irisa demanded an explanation and Thea attempted to give it amid several impatient interruptions from her sister.
When she was done, Irisa turned toward her father. "Papa, why didn't you go after Thea's mother?"
Thea's heart beat a wild rhythm as she waited for the answer to a question she had longed to ask herself.
Langley moved to stand near Jacqueline and laid his hand on her shoulder. Thea could appreciate his show of support for his second wife. She couldn't be finding it easy to hear her husband's sordid past.
"Papa?" Irisa prompted.
"At first I believed she'd run off with Estcott." Thea gasped in outrage and he sighed. "She left Town
at the same time. She had rejected me completely by then, and I thought she had come to the conclusion that she'd married the wrong man. We both courted her, you see. When he returned to Town, his reputation in tatters from what had happened in the country, I realized that Anna had never been with him. That I had been wrong about everything."
"Why didn't you search then?" The words were torn from Thea.
Her father met her gaze, his filled with sorrow. "I was too proud to beg. I thought if she held any affection for me or her son, she would have returned."
"She was too afraid of losing me as well."
Drake squeezed her as if to remind her of their conversation regarding her mother's joy and willing sacrifice in keeping her.
Langley nodded, seeming to age before her eyes. "I realize that now."
Irisa cocked her head and looked at her father as if he were a butterfly on a pin. "I think that if I loved someone, I would beg."
Langley said nothing.
Jacqueline put her hand out to take his. Thea wondered if perhaps true affection existed between the two. She hoped so. Or their marriage would not survive her final revelation.
Following the previous pattern she had set, Irisa precipitated the final unveiling as well. "When did your mother die?"
Thea took a deep breath and let it out. She met her aunt's gaze and saw the need for truth there. "Ten years ago."
* * *
Chapter 20
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