Charles woke before the house did.

Not fully before it. The Welles London townhouse was never truly asleep, not in any ordinary sense. Even at this hour there were sounds beneath the silence: the low complaint of pipes in old walls, a door closing softly somewhere belowstairs, the nearly soundless passage of someone who knew how not to disturb the family before breakfast. Outside, London had already begun to warm under a pale July sun. The light came through the curtains in long, flat bands, bright enough to make sleep feel faintly improper.

Charles lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling.

The sheet had been kicked down to his hips sometime in the night. He had slept in his boxers only, because it was July, because the room had held the day’s heat long after sunset, and because he was sixteen and in his own bedroom, whatever century the house itself preferred to pretend it occupied.

His skin was already warm.

For several seconds, he did not move.

Then memory arrived.

Not one memory. Several.

Noelle in the bookshop, face softening at the sight of crowded shelves. Noelle at the British Museum, standing before the Rosetta Stone with her head tipped slightly back, her whole face bright with concentration. Noelle laughing into her tea at breakfast, three sugars in and entirely unrepentant. Noelle’s hand tangled with his in the dim hotel room, small and warm and trusting. Noelle saying his name on the telephone as if she were pleased it belonged to him.

Charles closed his eyes.

That made it worse.

Her face came more clearly when he did that.

He opened them again and sat up.

The air in the room felt thick already, not oppressive exactly, but close enough that his hair had flattened at one side and risen badly at the crown. He pushed a hand through it and immediately regretted it. In the mirror across the room, the result looked less like sleep and more like mutiny.

“For God’s sake,” he muttered.

His own voice sounded rough from sleep and faintly too loud in the quiet room.

He got out of bed.

The floorboards were cool beneath his feet. That, at least, was something. He crossed to the bathroom, moving by habit through a room already arranged for him: shirt laid out over the chair back, trousers pressed, tie placed beside them, shoes waiting below, jacket brushed and hanging from the wardrobe door. On the writing desk, set apart from everything else, lay the cream folder.

He did not look at it yet.

He washed first.

Cold water over his face. Teeth brushed with the hard, minty efficiency of morning. A brief, severe inspection of his jaw in the mirror.

There was almost nothing there.

Almost.

Charles leaned closer, frowning slightly.

It would not have mattered at school. At St Edmonds, there were boys who shaved badly, boys who pretended they needed to shave, boys who truly needed to shave and somehow still managed to look as though they had been raised by wolves. In a dormitory, even polish had limits. One learned to dress quickly among the ordinary noises of other boys: water running, drawers slamming, someone swearing at a lost tie, someone else trying to borrow polish or toothpaste or a clean collar at seven in the morning.

But this was not St Edmonds.

This was his father’s London house.

And today involved the Altons.

Charles reached for the razor.

He did not need to shave. Not really. But the day did not allow for the possibility of being told he should have.

So he shaved anyway, carefully, almost angrily, over a face still young enough that the ritual felt faintly absurd. By the time he rinsed the razor and splashed cold water over his jaw again, his reflection looked no older. Only more awake. More irritated.

Then came the hair.

His hair was worst before it dried.

Wet, it submitted. Damp, it negotiated. Dry, it became ancestral.

He combed it back from his forehead with firm, practiced strokes, the way he had learned to do at school by Year 7, when homesickness had become irrelevant and chapel waited for no boy’s feelings. The thick dark hair obeyed at first. It always did when soaked. Then, as the towel-dampness began to leave it, a small section at the crown lifted again.

Charles stared at it.

He combed it down.

It rose.

He wet his fingers and pressed it flat.

It rose again, not dramatically, not enough for anyone sensible to notice, which made it worse.

He tried the comb once more.

The cowlick returned with quiet conviction.

Charles set the comb down with rather more precision than necessary.

He had rowed through rain. He had rowed through split blisters and frozen hands and the hideous final punishment of a Henley sprint. He had held stroke while seven other boys trusted his rhythm with their own exhaustion. And yet, four days after winning gold, he found himself standing half-naked in a Belgravia bathroom, defeated by a piece of hair no larger than his thumb.

He glared at it.

Eventually, with water, comb, and sheer force of will, the hair settled into something close enough to obedience. It was still too soft from sleep, still inclined to lift if disturbed, but it looked acceptable. It looked like Charles Welles. Or at least like the version of him people preferred to encounter before luncheon.

He returned to the bedroom.

The house had grown more audible now. A murmur beneath the floor. The faint clink of china. Someone crossing the landing at the far end. The disciplined machinery of morning gathering itself into motion.

Charles opened the drawer and took out fresh boxers.

The ones he had slept in went at once into the laundry basket. Fresh cotton, then socks. He sat on the edge of the bed to pull them on, dark and thin, his left knee bending sharply enough that the small pale scar there caught his eye.

It was no larger than a coin now.

At six, it had seemed enormous.

Portsea. A pony too clever for him. Wet grass. A moment of weightless humiliation before the ground struck hard and the world filled with shock. He remembered less of the pain than of the aftermath: mud on his shorts, tears he had not managed to stop fast enough, his brothers’ laughter arriving before sympathy could.

Edward had helped him up.

Thomas had laughed the hardest because Thomas had been frightened first.

Frederick had said, “You’re fine,” in the tone of someone making it true by declaring it.

Charles had learned a great deal from that scraped knee.

Mostly, he had learned speed.

Cry, if one had to. But never slowly. Never where everyone could watch it become part of the story.

He pulled the sock up and then was done with it.

Now the shirt.

White cotton, light enough for July but still formal, still crisp against his skin when he slipped his arms through. He buttoned it from the bottom upward, leaving the collar open for now. The cuffs hung loose around his wrists. He left them that way while he took up the trousers.

The shirt first, because it tucked better that way.

Charles stepped into the pale grey summer-weight trousers and fastened them, then smoothed the shirt down with both hands before tucking it in properly. Once. Then again at the sides. He checked the line in the mirror, turned slightly, corrected a small pull at the waistband, and checked it again.

No one would notice.

That was the point.

Things were only noticed when they were wrong.

He reached for the tie next.

Navy silk, restrained, nearly severe. Not his school tie. Not today. The family had selected the outfit before he had seen it: pale grey trousers, white shirt, dark tie, navy summer blazer. Garden party formal without seeming to reach for it. Young enough not to look ridiculous. Old enough to remind people what he was becoming.

He looped the tie around his neck.

The first knot came out too tight.

He pulled it free.

The second sat slightly wrong.

He stared at it, expression flattening.

Noelle would have smiled if she saw him like this. Not mockingly. Worse. Warmly. As if his irritation with the tie were something almost dear.

That thought made his fingers still.

For a moment he saw her as she had been outside the Tube after the museum, standing with one hand on the strap of her bag while London moved impatiently around them. They had already finished the ice cream by then. There was nothing left to do, no exhibit to look at, no cup or cone to occupy their hands. Only the entrance behind her, the afternoon thinning toward evening, and Noelle looking up at him as though every ordinary word they exchanged had somehow become difficult to end.

He remembered the way she had smiled when he said something too dry. The way she had looked down afterward, not quite hiding it. The way they had stood there for far too long discussing nothing useful at all because goodbye had become, absurdly, the hardest part of the day.

Charles looked at himself in the mirror and discovered, with real displeasure, that he had lost the thread of the knot entirely.

He undid it and began again.

This time it came right.

He tightened it, slid the knot into place, and fastened the top button of his collar. The fabric closed around his throat. The boy in the mirror looked more familiar now. More acceptable. Less likely to be asked what he was thinking.

The cufflinks came after.

Gold. Old, but not ancient. The smaller Welles eagle engraved cleanly on each face, the modern emblem polished enough to catch the morning light. He fixed the left cuff first, then the right. His fingers worked with automatic precision despite the roughness across them.

The hands always gave him away a little.

They were not soft. Not anymore. The years of rowing had thickened the skin across his palms and the bases of his fingers, leaving faint hardened seams where blisters had split and healed and split again. Near the back of his right hand, just below the knuckle, the tiny scar from the old wall at Portsea remained almost invisible unless the light caught it.

Thomas had dared him up that wall.

Of course he had.

Thomas had dared him into half the stupidest things he had ever done as a child, then acted personally offended when gravity or stone or an adult’s discovery interfered with the triumph of it.

Charles pressed the cufflink through the final hole and closed it.

Then he looked at the ring.

It lay on the small leather tray near his watch. Apart from the cufflinks. Apart from everything else.

The heir’s ring.

Even in stillness, it seemed heavier than anything around it.

Ancient gold. Oval face. Worn edges. A raised rim around the old engraving, softened where other hands had touched it for longer than Charles could properly imagine. The emblem was not the modern Welles crest. It was older and harsher, the aquila cut with fewer, sharper lines, wings spread, head turned to the right as if it had heard something moving in the dark. Beneath it were the key and the broken sword, worn but still legible if one knew how to look.

He had received it in May.

Sixteen.

The ring had been fitted for him before it was given over. Not resized, exactly. No one had used that word. No one would have dared. A discreet inner band had been made by the family jeweller so the ancient gold itself remained untouched, the old circle intact beneath the temporary accommodation of his youth.

It did not slip.

It did not hang loose.

It sat where it was meant to sit because people had measured him, prepared it, and made the inheritance fit before he was ready.

Charles picked it up.

The inside of the band brushed his thumb.

There were words there.

Hidden.

Known only to the heir once the ring was in his possession. Not to his brothers. Not to his mother. Not even to his father, though Graham wore authority so thoroughly one could forget there were still rooms in the family he had never been permitted to enter.

Charles had found the inscription alone.

That was part of the cruelty of it, he thought. Or part of the mercy. He had not decided which.

He did not turn the ring to look now.

He knew what it said.

He slid it onto the little finger of his right hand.

The hidden fitting held. Secure. Certain. Intolerable.

The old gold changed the look of his hand at once. Cufflinks could be polish. A tie could be uniform. But the ring was not decoration. It made him seem less like a schoolboy dressing for a summer garden party and more like a continuation that had briefly taken the form of a boy.

For a few seconds he simply looked at it.

Then, without quite meaning to, he turned it with his thumb.

Once.

Twice.

He stopped.

The habit was Edward’s originally. Edward had worried his own ring when he was younger, before learning to keep that sort of thing out of sight. The rest of them had outgrown their little betrayals of nerves. Or hidden them better.

Charles had not.

Not yet.

A knock came at the door.

He straightened at once.

“Yes?”

The door opened before he had crossed the room.

Thomas leaned in, already dressed, already looking as if the day had personally inconvenienced him. His collar was correct but somehow suggested resistance. His expression brightened the instant he saw Charles.

“Oh, good,” Thomas said. “You look like you’re about to be sent to your execution.”

Charles turned back to the mirror. “Good morning.”

“It isn’t. There are Altons involved.”

Charles reached for his brush and corrected the front of his hair by a fraction.

Thomas came inside and shut the door with his heel. “How long did that take?”

“What?”

“The hair.”

Charles did not look at him. “Shut up.”

Thomas’s eyes gleamed. “Longer than the briefing, then.”

“Shut up, Thomas.”

“It’s very obedient. I’m sure Father will be pleased.”

“It was already fine.”

“It was trying to leave the family.”

Charles set the brush down. “You’re insufferable.”

“And yet invited everywhere.”

“You weren’t invited in here.”

“No, but I sensed distress.” Thomas crossed the room and glanced toward the desk. His attention found the cream folder at once. “Ah. There it is.”

Charles turned. “Don’t.”

Thomas picked it up.

“Thomas.”

He opened it with the solemnity of a man handling scripture. “Welles Family Office,” he read aloud. “Private Social Briefing. Alton Garden Party. Prepared for Mr Charles Benjamin Welles.”

He looked up.

“You have become a document.”

“Put it down.”

“Distribution: Private slash Family Use Only.” Thomas’s grin widened. “Good God, Charlie. You have a distribution list.”

Charles crossed the room and reached for the folder, but Thomas pivoted away with the easy cruelty of an older brother who had enjoyed the advantages of height for too long and had not yet adjusted to Charles catching up.

“Primary Host Family,” Thomas continued, walking backward. “Lord Alton. Courteous, traditional, somewhat exacting. Values punctuality and visible courtesy from younger guests. Should be greeted promptly upon arrival.”

Charles held out his hand.

Thomas ignored it.

“Lady Alton. Socially attentive and observant. Likely to supervise introductions among younger guests.” His eyebrows rose. “Oh, this is promising.”

“Thomas.”

“Miss Beatrice Alton,” Thomas read, voice becoming unbearable. “Age fifteen. Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Only daughter of Lord and Lady Alton. Quiet in larger groups. Keen rider. Plays piano. Fond of botanical drawing and French literature.” He paused. “How dire.”

Charles snatched the folder.

Thomas let him, which was somehow worse than resisting.

“It’s not funny,” Charles said.

“It is extremely funny.”

“It’s tedious.”

“It is both.” Thomas watched him set the folder back on the desk. “Do they give you suggested openings?”

Charles said nothing.

Thomas lunged for the folder again.

Charles blocked him with one hand.

That only delighted him. “They do.”

“Leave it alone.”

“Do they tell you to ask after her horse?”

Charles’s ears went hot.

Thomas clapped once, softly. “They absolutely do.”

Charles picked up his jacket and turned away. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“Sadly, yes. This is the highlight of my morning.”

Charles shrugged into the jacket. The fabric settled across his shoulders with the clean, tailored weight of completion. He rolled one shoulder unconsciously as the seam pulled faintly at him; he had grown again, not enough to require a new fitting, but enough that the jacket reminded him it had been made around a prior version of his body.

Thomas saw.

“Still sore?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“Not badly.”

“You rowed stroke at Henley four days ago. You’re allowed to be sore.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t allowed.”

“You said no. Which was stupid.”

Charles adjusted the jacket front. “Thank you.”

Thomas leaned against the bedpost. “You’re welcome.”

The room quieted for a moment.

Charles reached for the pocket square.

It was only a white linen handkerchief.

That did not prevent it from becoming a trial.

He folded it once, slid it into the breast pocket, and found the line too high. He removed it, refolded, tried again. Too low. Again. One corner softened in a way that looked careless. Again.

Thomas watched in deepening satisfaction.

Charles could feel him watching.

“What,” Charles said.

“Nothing.”

“It’s something.”

“No, I’m merely enjoying the full horror of your personality.”

“It’s a pocket square.”

“Yes,” Thomas said. “And you are treating it like an unstable border negotiation.”

Charles removed it again.

The linen had begun to warm between his fingers. Irritation rose beneath his collar, ridiculous and immediate.

No one would care, he told himself.

This was untrue.

Someone would care. Or worse, no one would care because it would simply be expected to be right.

He folded it again, smaller this time, and set it in place.

Acceptable.

Probably.

Thomas tilted his head. “Marginally less fatal.”

Charles gave him a flat look.

“High praise,” Thomas said.

Another knock came, softer than the first.

Edward entered after waiting properly.

He carried a cup and saucer in one hand and a small plate with toast in the other. His gaze took in the room in a single quiet sweep: Charles dressed nearly to completion, Thomas far too pleased with himself, the folder visible on the desk, the pocket square finally conquered.

“I see you’ve survived the linen,” Edward said.

Thomas pointed at him. “See? Everyone noticed.”

Charles closed his eyes briefly.

Edward came farther into the room and offered the cup. “Tea.”

Charles accepted it. “Thank you.”

“And toast,” Edward added, setting the plate on the desk. “Mother says breakfast will be in twenty minutes. I thought you might prefer not to arrive downstairs hungry and then refuse everything out of tension.”

“I wouldn’t.”

Thomas laughed.

Charles looked at him. “I wouldn’t.”

Edward’s expression remained mild. “Eat half.”

Charles set the tea down and picked up a piece of toast because refusing would turn the matter into an event.

Edward’s eyes dropped to his right hand.

Only briefly.

Charles noticed.

Edward did not comment on the ring at once. He was better than Thomas in that respect. Better than most of them. His attention never felt like seizure. It only rested, then withdrew.

“How does it feel today?” Edward asked quietly.

Charles knew what he meant.

He looked down at the ring.

“Fine.”

Thomas snorted.

Edward ignored him. “Fine as in fine, or fine as in you’d rather remove your own hand than discuss it?”

Charles took a bite of toast.

Thomas looked delighted. “That’s the one.”

Charles swallowed. “It feels less strange than it did.”

Edward’s face softened by a degree. “That’s something.”

“It still looks,” Charles paused, searching for the least sentimental version of the truth, “older than me.”

“It is older than all of us,” Edward said.

“That doesn’t help.”

“No,” Edward said. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

Thomas pushed away from the bedpost and came to stand beside the desk. For once he did not reach for the folder. “It suits you.”

Charles looked at him suspiciously.

Thomas raised both hands. “That was not a trap.”

“That would be unlike you.”

“Yes, well, treasure it.”

Charles looked away first.

His thumb found the ring again. Turned it once.

He stopped as soon as he realized.

Edward saw, and something old passed through his expression. Recognition, perhaps. Or apology. He did not say anything. That was how Charles knew he had noticed fully.

Thomas, mercifully, had turned back toward the folder.

“So,” he said. “Beatrice Alton.”

Charles reached for his tea. “What about her?”

“She rides. She draws plants. She is quiet in groups. She plays piano. She sounds precisely engineered to terrify you.”

“She does not terrify me.”

“No, of course not. Girls never terrify you. Conversation terrifies you. Girls merely worsen the terrain.”

Edward gave him a warning look. “Thomas.”

“What? I’m being supportive.”

“You are not.”

“I am. I am preparing him for the campaign.”

Charles set the cup down harder than necessary. Not hard enough to rattle the saucer. He was still himself.

“There is no campaign.”

Thomas stared at him.

Then he grinned slowly.

“Oh.”

Charles went still.

Edward looked at Thomas. “Don’t.”

But Thomas had already heard the thing Charles had not meant to reveal. Not a secret. Nothing concrete. Only the too-swift edge of refusal. The tone of a boy whose thoughts were not where his family expected them to be.

“Oh,” Thomas said again, much softer, infinitely worse.

Charles turned toward the mirror and adjusted his tie by a fraction. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“No,” Thomas said. “I’m sure you don’t.”

Edward moved before Thomas could say more, stepping to Charles’s side and straightening a lapel that did not need straightening. The gesture gave Charles something to look at besides his brother’s face.

“You don’t have to make anything of the afternoon,” Edward said. “Greet the hosts. Be courteous to Miss Alton. Let people congratulate you on Henley without making them feel foolish for doing it. Stay visible. That’s all.”

Charles glanced toward the folder. “That is not all.”

“No,” Edward said. “But it is enough.”

Thomas folded his arms. “And do try not to vanish into a library.”

Charles’s jaw tightened.

Edward’s mouth twitched.

Thomas, encouraged, went on. “Or a study. Or an orangery. Or a side garden. Or rear terrace. Or—what was the other one?”

Charles said nothing.

Thomas snapped his fingers. “Service corridor.”

“I was eleven.”

Edward looked at him. “There was a dog, wasn’t there?”

Charles stared.

Thomas burst out laughing.

Charles looked between them. “That was a reasonable explanation.”

“You were gone forty minutes,” Thomas said.

“The dog was lost.”

“The dog lived there.”

“It might not have known that.”

Edward, who was trying not to smile and failing in the restrained Edward way, adjusted Charles’s pocket square a bare millimeter. “There.”

Charles looked down. “Was it wrong?”

“No.”

“Then why did you touch it?”

“Because now if Mother looks at it, I can say I checked.”

That was irritatingly sound.

Charles accepted it.

Edward stepped back and looked him over with the gentle seriousness that always made Charles feel both steadier and more exposed. “You look well.”

Thomas leaned in. “He looks like a boy who has spent twenty minutes trying to murder his own hair.”

Charles said, “I will throw something at you.”

“You won’t. You’re dressed.”

“Enough,” Edward said, though not sharply.

The word settled the room.

For a moment the three of them stood together in the morning light: Edward calm and careful, Thomas irreverent and watchful, Charles sixteen and already dressed into something older than himself.

Belowstairs, the house moved toward breakfast.

Charles looked once more at the mirror.

The boy reflected there was immaculate now. Navy blazer. White shirt. Tie straight. Pocket square correct. Hair disciplined into place by effort no one would be permitted to witness. Cufflinks fastened. Ancient gold on the right hand.

No visible sign of the boy who had woken overheated and bare-shouldered beneath twisted sheets.

No visible sign of the old knee scar, or the wall scrape, or the rowing calluses unless one came close enough to take his hand.

No visible sign at all of Noelle Yoo.

That was the point of dressing well, he supposed.

It hid what mattered.

Or tried to.

The cream folder remained on the desk.

Charles picked it up.

Thomas groaned. “You are not bringing it.”

“I’m not.”

Charles opened the top drawer and placed the folder inside, face down.

A small rebellion.

Ridiculous.

Insufficient.

Still, it steadied him.

He closed the drawer.

Edward noticed. Of course he did. His eyes softened, but he did not comment.

Thomas did.

“Careful,” he said. “At this rate you’ll be smoking in trees by teatime.”

Charles frowned. “What?”

“Nothing. Merely charting your moral decline.”

Charles shook his head.

Then, because some perverse part of the morning had not yet finished humiliating him, the section of hair at his crown lifted again.

Not much.

Barely at all.

Thomas saw it.

Charles saw Thomas see it.

For one second neither moved.

Then Charles turned sharply back to the mirror.

Thomas made a strangled sound of delight.

“Don’t,” Charles said.

“I said nothing.”

“You breathed.”

“I’m allowed to breathe.”

Charles reached for the comb again. He wet his fingers from the glass beside the basin and dragged them back through the offending section with controlled violence. The hair flattened obediently beneath his hand.

Then rose again.

Thomas’s mouth opened.

Charles pointed at him without looking. “Do not.”

Thomas closed his mouth.

Edward, from near the door, made the mistake of looking amused.

Charles looked at him too. “Not you either.”

“I said nothing,” Edward said.

“You thought it.”

Thomas took pity on him then, which was somehow worse than laughter.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, and crossed to the bathroom.

Charles turned. “What are you doing?”

“Preventing a constitutional crisis.”

Thomas returned with the small glass jar from beside the basin, the one Charles had been pretending not to see all morning. Grooming cream. Discreet. Expensive. Irritatingly effective.

“I don’t need that,” Charles said.

“You absolutely need that.”

“I don’t want my hair slick.”

“You are not going to look like Julian before dinner,” Thomas said. “Hold still.”

Charles stiffened. “I can do it.”

“Yes, and apparently you can also lose a war to your own head.”

Edward’s mouth twitched.

Thomas opened the jar, took the smallest amount possible on two fingers, and rubbed it between his hands until it nearly disappeared.

Charles watched him in the mirror with deep suspicion.

“That’s too much.”

“It’s not enough to sedate a sparrow.”

“I don’t want it visible.”

“It won’t be visible.”

“It smells.”

“It smells like every man in this family before he disappoints someone at luncheon. Hold still.”

Charles looked murderous, but he held still.

Thomas stepped behind him.

The difference in height was still enough to irritate Charles. Thomas, at twenty-three, had settled into the easy height of a grown man, six foot two and loose-limbed and comfortable with himself in a way Charles had never yet been permitted to feel. Edward, at six feet, stood calmer by the door, watching with that slight softness in his eyes that made Charles feel more exposed than Thomas’s mockery ever did.

Charles, at five foot ten, was tall enough now that people had begun speaking of his height as if it were inevitable. But between his brothers, in his own bedroom, with his hair refusing discipline and his collar growing warm against his throat, he felt exactly sixteen.

Thomas worked the cream lightly through the unruly section, then combed it back with two brisk, efficient strokes.

“There,” he said.

Charles stared at the mirror.

The cowlick stayed down.

The success was infuriating.

Thomas capped the jar and set it on the dressing table with theatrical delicacy.

“You’re welcome.”

“I didn’t say thank you.”

“I felt it in the room.”

“You didn’t.”

“You projected it.”

Edward came forward then, quieter than Thomas, and adjusted Charles’s pocket square by the smallest possible measure.

Charles looked down. “Was that wrong?”

“No,” Edward said. “But now Mother can blame me if it is.”

Thomas looked Charles over with grave assessment.

“Navy blazer. Ancient ring. Hair subdued. Pocket square sufficiently joyless.” He nodded. “The empire survives.”

Charles looked at him in the mirror.

For all the teasing, Thomas’s hand had been careful. He had not made Charles look slick or vain or overdone. He had only solved the thing Charles had been too proud and too irritated to solve sensibly himself.

Charles looked away first.

“Thank you,” he said, barely audible.

Thomas’s expression shifted.

Only for a second.

Then the grin returned, easier and less sharp.

“Christ,” he said. “Warn a man before you become touching.”

Charles reached for the comb as if considering throwing it.

Edward opened the door.

“We should go down.”

Charles gave one last glance to the desk, the drawer, the hidden folder, the room that had briefly contained him before the day could. Then he followed his brothers into the hall.

The staircase lay ahead, polished and curving, carrying them downward into the ordered hum of the house.

With each step, the morning narrowed.

Breakfast. Mother’s eye. Father’s measured approval or silence. The cars. The Altons. Beatrice. The garden. Henley congratulations. A hundred small performances arranged beneath sunlight.

Charles kept his right hand close to his side as he walked.

But halfway down the stairs, his thumb found the ring again.

Once.

Only once.

Then he let go.