Chapter 2
His name was August.
Verity had chosen it months before he was born.
She whispered it repeatedly while holding him.
As though someone might take the name too if she stopped saying it.
August Fenwicke.
Six days old.
Six days alive while his mother mourned him thirty rooms away.
I wanted Eudora to explain immediately.
Verity mattered more.
“Do you want privacy?”
She nodded.
I cleared the nursery.
Everyone except the nurse.
Then Verity changed her mind.
“Her too.”
The nurse looked stricken.
I did not interfere.
She left.
Verity remained with August.
I shut the door.
Only then did I turn toward Eudora.
The hallway was empty except for Rafe.
“Who was taking him?”
She stared toward the nursery.
“My sister.”
I said nothing.
“Lenora.”
I knew Lenora Ainsworth.
Thirty-one.
Married to Adrian Vale.
A marriage connecting two old families whose relationship with mine had been stable for years.
“What does Lenora want with Verity’s child?”
Eudora whispered:
“She lost hers.”
I already knew.
Lenora delivered a son three weeks earlier.
The infant died within hours.
No spectacle.
Private grief.
I had sent condolences.
That was all.
I stared at Eudora.
“So you replaced him.”
Her face tightened.
“Don’t say it like that.”
“How should I say it?”
“She was falling apart.”
“That explains your sister.”
I stepped closer.
“Explain Verity.”
Silence.
Eudora tried again.
“August would have been cared for.”
“By his mother.”
“She has nothing.”
There it was.
I became still.
Eudora heard herself too late.
Verity was a maid.
Widowed during pregnancy.
Her husband, Matthew Fenwicke, had died four months earlier in a highway accident.
No powerful family behind her.
No wealthy parents.
No branch capable of making Eudora afraid.
“She has her son.”
I spoke slowly.
“That is not nothing.”
Eudora’s eyes filled.
“You don’t understand what would happen to Lenora.”
“Then explain it.”
She looked away.
The Vale marriage had been built around more than affection.
Adrian Vale loved Lenora.
But their fathers had also used the marriage to bind two old territories and generations of resentment.
The birth of a son had become symbolic before the child even arrived.
Then the baby died.
Eudora’s father panicked.
Not Lenora.
Her father.
Cedric Ainsworth had decided the loss would make his family look weak.
So he found another newborn.
Healthy.
Male.
Born inside an estate his daughter was about to marry into.
A child whose mother, in Cedric’s words—
May you like
“Could be compensated.”
I stopped hearing anything after that.
