It feels like I’m glowing, but that’s just the ale mixing with the sun.

I’ll need to nurse this. I’ve already lost my head and have to hold what’s left of it together, especially with Hugh in hiding.

I look up to the study window, surprised to see my husband standing in the front doorway instead, leaning against the casement, feet crossed at the ankles, like he’s overseeing work being done on the property.

Now the guilt comes. Here it is, as heavy and murky and queasy and panicked as I remember it. I’m sure Hugh can see it all over my face, but he just raises his eyebrows, nodding at my beer.

I start to look for Matty, then realize how incriminating it would be for me to stare at him right now. It’s nothing Hugh needs to know about. My God, it’s nothing at all. It’s just the Day, like they say, a sixteen-hour sequence of errant, erratic events. There will be no reckoning until tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow, and if not, there will be no fallout whatsoever.

I raise my pint to Hugh across the distance, an offering. Join me. Shake me out of this. Hold my hand and root me to the ground. He lowers his head, and I see an empty lowball glass at his feet. He’s still at the scotch, drinking alone. He blinks hard, staring over my shoulder, but I don’t feel rejected. There’s something in the strain of his expression that suggests double vision. He doesn’t see me standing here.

He wobbles when he stoops to pick up the glass and disappears with it back inside.

The moment he’s gone, I wish fervently not that he was out here but that his father was. I never knew him, the late Lord Treadway. I wish I had. At his funeral, everyone said how earthy he was, how much a part of daily life here, playing with the schoolchildren, attempting to fix people’s plumbing, their cars. He and John Ashford worked together on repairs when the pickup’s engine broke down, and now they’re both gone.

Yes. There will be a reckoning tomorrow. The kind that will last forever.