Just as it was Val who’d lost everything that night.

“But she believes she is,” Sidney persisted, unrelenting and refusing to let the matter go. “And she believes your failure to come ’round or leave this . . . house is because of her.”

“My failure to leave this house comes from the fact that I want to be here,” he said, taking another swallow of his drink.

“You should come—”

“Why?” he asked, cutting his brother off. “Why should I go?” He didn’t let Sidney have a chance to answer. “Because I should somehow care more that Mother feels badly that my wife died on a carriage ride to her house party? Because I should don a grin”—and a fake one, at that—“and take part in the joyous affair so that other people might feel better?” Val sank his elbows on the edge of his desk and leaned forward.

“You did not die that day, Val.”

He recoiled, his entire body jolting away from that quiet pronouncement from his brother.

Val sucked in a slow breath through his teeth. “But I did, Sidney. I did.”

And someday, his brother would likely fall in love and feel the unending joy Val had known for the brief time he’d been wed . . . and would know. And, God willing, would also not know the agony that came in losing one’s partner in life.

Sidney tapped the arm of the chair, drumming his fingertips along the gleaming black leather in time to the ormolu clock that ticked away the passing seconds. “There’s nothing I can say to convince you to—”

“There is nothing.”

Still, even with that abrupt rejection, Sidney remained affixed to his seat. Ever the eternal optimist, the fellow filled with hope, as Val had one time been.

“One of these years, you will change your mind, brother,” Sidney finally said, and then with a reluctance to his movements, he stood. “And I will be ever so glad to see you there.” Reaching inside his cloak, he withdrew a small, wrapped package. “Happy Christmas to you, brother,” he said, setting down the gift he always arrived with this time of year.

Val inclined his head.

Happy Christmas . . .

That warm salutation hovered in the air, even as his brother took his leave and beyond, and Val sat there in silence with those two words.

Happy Christmas?

It was a salutation issued every winter by his brother. And yet, Sidney failed either to know or to care that since Dinah’s passing, there was nothing, and would be nothing, worth celebrating.

With Sidney at last gone, Val opened the deep bottom right drawer and deposited that gift alongside the three others tucked away there.

Letting out a boisterous bark, Horace bounded over and nudged his head inside, nosing the packages there. Each wrapped as they’d been in a similar packaging, each decked with a gold velvet bow.