And Jasper was pink and blond and chubby and so fucking cheerful and oh, how Theo loved him—

And Jack was a father, three times over, when Theo couldn’t bear to try again, another fault, another failure—

And he let Jasper play with the hunting dogs and nurse the runt of the litter by hand—

Tom had a little girl with toasted brown skin, Gabrielle, and he was so delighted, his doughy face beautiful as he held her in his arms, and he sent her up to Gwynns, made sure they all looked out for her, didn’t let the stain of his past touch her—

And little Hya Dumont dug in the gardens with Jasper, getting dirty and laughing and trailing mud all through the house—

And Theo read them stories, so many stories, because he wanted to teach them to dream—

And Alexia, so much stronger than he was, sat him down and said, firmly, lovingly, “It’s time.”

And on many of those days, he didn’t think about Jack, really.

It was a lie, but a necessary one.

He didn’t know that on all of those days, Jack was thinking about him.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jack Gardner had always wanted Theodore Beaumont.

And, as much as he hid from it, raged against it silently, locked it up in a dark bedroom with the cold and the spitting rain and the moldy crumbs—he knew exactly when wanting Theo shamed and bloody and broken had revealed itself as wanting to hold him and never let go.

Because Theo had been shamed, bloody, broken, lip split and barely breathing, and all Jack had thought was no, no, please—

I can’t live without him.

He had left him in that locker room—ran away, panicked, terrified of his own capacity for violence and the sudden knowledge, the true root of him, the explanation, the reason he kept going, day after day, Theo, hated, beloved, beautiful as he was baptized by his own blood. It was a hideous kind of love, nothing warm or soft about it. It wasn’t like the love he had for Meg, who was sweet and kind and a little acerbic and a lot stubborn, a girl who loved him back, who made him feel good about himself, and who felt like family already.

Jack felt a shard of something digging into his knee, probably cutting him. He stayed still, hardly breathing.

He couldn’t help but remember that boy in the locker room now. Theo sat, hunched over himself with his elbows on his knees, those long legs folded up, and he held the still-burning butt of a cigarette. A bottle of Bushmills sat next to him, not quite half gone. And he looked the same to him—all the years were meaningless, the laugh lines, the hair lightened by age—he was his Theo, the person he knew, down in his soul, he needed more than he needed air.

The person he’d injured, terribly. More than once.