“Of course.” Reynolds watched him closely, too closely. “You and I have known each other a long time, haven’t we?”

“A decade, I suppose,” Jasper said with a nod. “Since just after you left the navy.”

“And we were friends, I think, before you took the title and asked me to take over as man of affairs,” Reynolds continued.

Jasper wrinkled his brow. “We are still friends.”

Reynolds chuckled. “Well, we may be that, but you know as well as I do that everything changes once you work for a man. The dynamic certainly isn’t the same, nor should it be.”

“What are you getting at?” Jasper asked, shifting the papers in front of him so Reynolds wouldn’t see how this exploration made him uncomfortable. Any vulnerability always did, because it felt like danger.

“I saw you with your wife, Jasper,” Reynolds said, reverting to a comfortable address he hadn’t used in a year. “I saw your face when I came into the room, and I haven’t seen that expression since before Solomon’s death. A moment where my old friend, the one with far fewer burdens, still existed.”

Jasper shook his head. “You saw a ghost then, because that man died alongside my brother, as surely as if he were shot in that duel.”

“I thought that too, and mourned him when you took the title,” Reynolds pressed. “But it seems he was only maimed, not killed that day. He was with her at that very desk not half an hour ago.”

Jasper stared blankly at the papers before him. Sometimes he did feel like that old self when he was with Thomasina. The heavy weight of all he carried slipped away when he touched her, forgotten even if only for a moment and that made him…lighter somehow.

“Isn’t it dangerous to forget one’s duties like that, though?” he asked, to himself as much as his friend.

Reynolds’ smile was a little sad. “I know you. You’d never forget permanently. But you deserve the break, I think, if you can find it with her.”

“That wasn’t the purpose of the marriage,” Jasper mused.

Reynolds was quiet a moment. “It doesn’t mean it isn’t a fine side effect, though.”

“She is unexpected,” Jasper admitted slowly. “In a great many ways. I never thought to be surprised but I have been so far. And I don’t…dislike the sensation. But it is not a love match.”

He said it out loud and shifted beneath the cruelty of the words. The finality he had put on them, as if nothing could ever shift or change. Change hadn’t been his friend of late, but now he felt an odd longing for it.

“It doesn’t have to be a love match to be good or happy,” Reynolds said with a shrug. “And I would suggest, in my last moments here as your friend and not your man of affairs who could be fired for such impertinence, that you ought not dismiss any person who can give you peace in a world of chaos.” He nodded and his face went impassive. “Now, is there anything else you require before I continue my investigation, my lord?”